Sing, Wild Bird, Sing Quotes

“Look for the one who sees the blessing.”
― Jacqueline O'Mahony, Sing, Wild Bird, Sing

“Lucky we are when we know we’re doing something or seeing someone for the last time.”
― Jacqueline O'Mahony, Sing, Wild Bird, Sing

“The people you have been, they are ghosts, now, Honora, she told herself. Let them go. Set them free, and concern yourself only with going on, from now on.”
― Jacqueline O'Mahony, Sing, Wild Bird, Sing

“He cannot say what he wants to say, fully. Like me, she thought. Like me. We scrabble in the stones of English, looking for what we need and never finding it.”
― Jacqueline O'Mahony, Sing, Wild Bird, Sing

“If anything had been different, everything would have been different.”
― Jacqueline O'Mahony, Sing, Wild Bird, Sing

“The snow started to fall as they went back up the hill, away from the lodge. First the wind stopped quite suddenly as if someone had drawn it up into a bag. It grew very quiet and still, as if the land itself were holding its breath in anticipation of something, and then, almost as a release, as if a space had opened, the snow began.”
― Jacqueline O'Mahony, Sing, Wild Bird, Sing

“This book was inspired by the story of the people who set out on a walk for help on March 30, 1849, in Doolough, Ireland. It was a hard story to hear, and a hard story to tell, not least because to separate the story from the history, the people from what had happened to them, was a difficult process. For a long time, I struggled with the idea of giving a voice to those who’d been silenced, of making them into characters in a story of my telling. Their history, their ending, is theirs alone. I can only hope that those who didn’t survive Doolough, who didn’t get to tell their own story, would have been glad to have had it recounted as it is here, and that they would forgive me any mistellings, omissions, or misunderstandings. This book is for them, and for the Cayuse people of the Pacific Northwest, who today form part of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeast Oregon. The Cayuse are, as they say, still here. The Irish and the Cayuse were banished to wander the world. May their souls, and the souls of their ancestors and their descendants, find peace in their ancestral homelands.”
― Jacqueline O'Mahony, Sing, Wild Bird, Sing

“strange feeling of detachment, of leaving her body, that she had known before—in the cave as the baby was about to be born, in the small room high in the house in New York—when she had tried to understand what was happening to her, and it began to feel like looking too long at the sun. In these moments, it felt that she was living too close to the center of experience, that the reality of the moment was too much to bear and an accommodation had to be made, and that accommodation was this splitting of herself, this drift away.”
― Jacqueline O'Mahony, Sing, Wild Bird, Sing

“No feeling is final . . . Nearby is the country they call life. —Rilke”
― Jacqueline O'Mahony, Sing, Wild Bird, Sing

“She would never forget, she knew, the feeling of not being able to speak. Even the memory of the words being stuck in her throat like stones made her feel cold with fear.”
― Jacqueline O'Mahony, Sing, Wild Bird, Sing

“Men always did what they wanted and then needed to know if they had done it well.”
― Jacqueline O'Mahony, Sing, Wild Bird, Sing

“Because that was the thing she wanted to express: stories were only real once they were told. All the other stories that weren’t told, or heard, that had no teller, or listener—it was as if the thing had never happened at all. You could pretend it had never happened, or you could refashion events in your head to your own liking until you came to an ending you liked. Once you made the choice to tell a story, it went from being yours to the listener’s, and then there was no way of managing things after that; the story belonged to other people,”
― Jacqueline O'Mahony, Sing, Wild Bird, Sing

“You’re reliable. If you think something is, it usually is. You only slow yourself down by questioning yourself. Remember that. Stop slowing yourself down, and trust yourself more.”
― Jacqueline O'Mahony, Sing, Wild Bird, Sing