Dymphna Quotes

But if you eat this chap who's God,' said Llewelyn stoutly, 'how can it be horrible? If it's alright to eat God why is it horrible to eat Jim Whittle?' 'Because,' said Dymphna reasonably, ' if you eat God there's always plenty left. You can't eat God up because God just goes on and on and on and God can't ever be finished...

Dymphna's talk of concentration camp survivors reminds you that you are super-privileged and self-absorbed and that really your suffering doesn't mean much by comparison. 'You have to choose how you respond to your own suffering. Everyone has to find meaning.' 'Everyone is full of shit,' you want to say, but you don't. You are learning not to say such things. This is what is meant by well-adjusted.

She's injured," I said. "we're not just carrying her around for the craic, you know." Sister Dymphna frowned. "I don't like young ladies who are cheeky," she said. I don't like old bats who are too senile to spot a pretty obvious problem.

A PRAYER TO SAINT DYMPHNA Good Saint Dymphna, great wonder-worker in every affliction of mind and body, I humbly implore thy powerful intercession with Jesus through Mary, Health of the Sick, in my present need. (Mention it.) Saint Dymphna, martyr of purity, patroness of those who suffer with nervous and mental afflictions, beloved child of Jesus and Mary, pray to Them for me and obtain my request. Saint Dymphna, pray for us. Saint Gerebran, pray for us.

Shaking, Brioc reached for the hunting knife on his belt. His hand closed around its hilt and he slid it out. Hot tears stung his eyes, and for a second he had to close them, fighting them back. He had no choice. Opening his eyes, he wrapped his free arm around Sam’s neck, then jerked her head back, so hard she yelped. He shoved the knife in and slit her throat.

feeling of bubbling

He folded back the hem of her housedress. Peeled the wet underpants from her skin and moved them down over her pale knees and her small feet and then dropped them on the floor. He could hear the voices of the children playing in the tree outside. He gently pushed her thighs apart and saw immediately that the baby had already begun to crown. Her skin was paler than his wife’s was, even in midwinter. He gave her his hand to get her through the next contraction, keeping his arm steady as she squeezed. He spread the fingers of the other over her taut belly. Mr. Persichetti wore a silver Saint Christopher’s medal around his neck and kept a Sacred Heart scapular in his pocket, but when Mary Keane asked him, catching her breath, “Who’s the patron saint of women in labor?” he shrugged. He told her he only knew Saint Dymphna was the patron of the insane. He’d had the

He folded back the hem of her housedress. Peeled the wet underpants from her skin and moved them down over her pale knees and her small feet and then dropped them on the floor. He could hear the voices of the children playing in the tree outside. He gently pushed her thighs apart and saw immediately that the baby had already begun to crown. Her skin was paler than his wife’s was, even in midwinter. He gave her his hand to get her through the next contraction, keeping his arm steady as she squeezed. He spread the fingers of the other over her taut belly. Mr. Persichetti wore a silver Saint Christopher’s medal around his neck and kept a Sacred Heart scapular in his pocket, but when Mary Keane asked him, catching her breath, “Who’s the patron saint of women in labor?” he shrugged. He told her he only knew Saint Dymphna was the patron of the insane. He’d had the story from an Irish priest assigned to Creedmoor. “A sad case himself,” Mr. Persichetti said, and gently pulled the damp hem of her dress back over her thighs. For a moment he found himself incapable of remembering Mr. Keane’s face, although they’d been neighbors for perhaps ten years. Nor could he remember another conversation he’d had with this woman stretched before him now on her living-room couch, her hair damp and her eyes a kind of gray, or green. He took her hand as if she were his child, or his own wife. “Apparently,” he said, “this Saint Dymphna was the daughter of an Irish chieftain, a pagan. But she had a beautiful Christian mother.” Gray eyes or green, he thought they were the one thing that might have made her pretty when she was young. “So the mother dies.” He paused only briefly. “When the girl’s about fourteen. And the chieftain goes crazy and tells his servants to go out and find another beautiful woman who resembled his dead wife so he can marry her.” He paused again to touch her

The servants were evil,” he said, recalling the tale the way the whiskey priest they sent to Creedmoor told it, sitting with Mr. Persichetti at the nurses’ station late into the night, those watery blue eyes forever bloodshot and sleepless. “They told the crazy chieftain that he should marry his beautiful daughter instead. Which he tried to do.” (“If you get my meaning,” the priest had said.) “But Dymphna ran off to Belgium.” He saw her grimace and purse her lips, her face seemed to swell with color. “Her crazy father followed her,” he said, tightening his own grip on her hand. “I guess he cut off her head.