Star of the Sea Quotes

“Love and freedom are such hideous words. So many cruelties have been done in their name.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“It is not a matter of ends justifying means: but of the creation of new means and new ends.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“Everything is in the way the material is composed.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“They had no previous connection whatever with Connemara; but they saw connections where others who should have seen them simply looked the other way.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“Any assemblage comprising human beings, any family, any party, any tribe, any nation, will bind itself together not by what it shares but ultimately by what it fears, which is often so much greater. Perhaps it abhors the outsider as camouflage for its own alarms; dreading what it would do to itself were the binding to fall asunder.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“They had far more in common than either realised. One was born Catholic, the other Protestant. One was born Irish, the other British. But neither was the greatest difference between them. One was born rich and the other poor.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“That each man is the sum of his choices is nothing less than the truth. And each, perhaps, is also something else.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“How the prisoner and the immigrant are treated by the government, how the poor are treated and those without influence: this is secretly how the government would like to treat us all.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“...but as his father used to say when he had a few drinks taken, you couldn't expect bloody miracles when you were talking about God.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“Politics' the polite word for antediluvian prejudices, the rags put on by enmity and tribal resentment.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“Truly the angels are come among us every day. Our difficulty is so often that in our vanity and worldliness we so utterly fail to recognise them for what they are.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star Of The Sea

“It was mankind and not the Almighty that had ordered the universe; only a man could look at an accident and call it a creation with Himself at the centre.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“History happens in the first person but is written in the third. This is what makes history a completely useless art.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star Of The Sea

“He was one of those men who attract great attention by making a great effort to attract none.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“Green eyes like his mother's. Like beautiful marble. You could catch the fever from somebody's eyes.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“Boredom is a bit of a bore, to say the least.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“We still tell each other that we are lucky to be alive, when our being alive has almost nothing to do with luck, but with geography, pigmentation, and international exchange rates.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea