Michael Hurley Quotes

Hell was a place ruled by the logic of children.

What you go searching for and what you find aren't always the same.

I often thought there was too much time there. That the place was sick with it. Haunted by it. Time didn't leak away as it should. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along. It collected as the black water did on the marshes and remained and stagnated in the same way.

Pity is the only thing a drunk has in abundance.

Life here arose of its own accord and for no particular reason. It went unexamined, and died unremembered.

It was a safari park of degradation. What a world without God looked like.

not noticing, or wilfully ignoring, the look of horror that Mummer tried to slide discreetly his way, as though on a folded piece of paper. Without

Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness’.

The will of Richard's father had been to ensure that his son was in no doubt that a church was merely a meeting place for the mentally ill, and that all who gathered there--priest and parishioners--were like fearful, asinine schizophrenics. There was no God, no devil, no heaven or hell, no posthumous judgment for wickedness or reward for piety; there was no resurrection, no transfiguration, no illimitable bliss, no life everlasting. The sum of human existence was collagen and calcium phosphate. And then nothing.

autumn. I quite envy them really, the simple vessels they have to fill.

The Gaffer once told me how it was when he was a child and someone died in the Endlands. The relatives of the deceased would blacken one of their mules from tail to lips with wet peat and sent it wandering down the valley to let the other families know that death had paid a visit. When the mule was found, it was washed in the river and taken back to where it belonged. And with them they'd bring bread and meat and soul's cake. In those days, the Gaffer said, the body was not considered unclean or frightening and before it went to the undertaker's the loved one was laid out in the front room for touch and kisses. Yuck, says Adam. But think of it like this, I say: Death would have plenty of time with them. The least we could do was let them stay in the house with their family for a little while longer. Special candles, thick as leeks, were placed at the head and the feet, and the floor was strewn with salt and rosemary. And then the soul's cake would be laid on the chest over the heart and the living would each take their share. Not a speck could be left, no hidden under shirt buttons or between the fingers of folded hands. It was a privilege of the dead to pass on with all their sins eaten away. The burden now rested with the living.

Kat looked at them as they spoke, wanting to say something. She'd told me often enough that the nursery wasn't without its problems. It wasn't all singing and painting rainbows. But she believed that children were innocent parrots of their mothers' and fathers' prejudices. Wickedness wasn't innate. Well, she hadn't seen what Lennie Sturzaker used to do to me. No, some children are like pigs in a wood. Weaknesses to them are as pungent as truffles.

Decisions made without sentiment about what was junk and what was useful. Packing away a life is a slow, fragmented affair. Everyone is outlived by objects, everyone bequeaths an uncurated museum to the living.

The monks didn't like to go up on to the moors. There was something unwholesome about the place, they said. There were strange shapes far off on the ridges and sometimes noises under the peat. When they came to collect kindling and fuel for the abbey's fireplaces, they wouldn't go too deep into the Wood either. There was something worse than the wolves in there, something that always seemed determined to follow them out into the open.

I needed to see how quickly life went out. One moment everything, the next nothing. And there was nothing, afterwards. But I knew that already. I'd look at the porcelain dolls and the glass swans on the mantlepiece that Mam left behind and wait for them to tell me something. But they never did. Not even if I held them in my hand and closed my eyes. The dead were dead. That was why, the Devil said, I shouldn't waste the time I had while I was alive.

The Devil has been here since before anyone came, passing endlessly from one thing to another. He's in the rain and the gales and the wild river. He's in the trees of the Wood. He's the unexpected fire and the biter of dogs. He's the disease that can ruin a whole farm and the blizzard that buries a whole village. But at least here we can see him at work.

Father Wilfred had told us time and time again that it was our duty as Christians to see what our faith had taught us to see. And consequently Mummer used to come home from the shop with all kinds of stories about how God had seen fit to reward the good and justly punish the wicked. The lady who worked at the bookmakers had developed warts on her fingers from handling dirty money all day long. The Wilkinson girl, who had visited the clinic on the Finchley Road that the women at Saint Jude’s talked about in hushed tones, had been knocked down by a car not a week later and had her pelvis snapped beyond repair. Conversely, an elderly lady who came into the shop every week for prayer cards and had spent much of the previous decade raising money for Cafod, won a trip to Fatima.

Mummer would tell us these tales over the dinner table without a flicker of doubt that God’s hand was at work in the world, as it had been in the time of the saints and martyrs, the violent deaths of whom were regularly inflicted upon us as exempla of not only the unconditional oath we had to make to the service of the Lord, but of the necessity of suffering. The worse the torment, the more God was able to make Himself known, Mummer said, invoking the same branch of esoteric mathematics Father Wilfred used in his sermons to explain why the world was full of war and murder – a formula by which cruelty could be shown to be inversely proportionate to mercy. The more inhumane the misery we could inflict upon one another, the more compassionate God seemed as a counterpoint to us. It was through pain that we would know how far we still had to go to be perfect in His eyes. And so, unless one suffered, Father Wilfred was wont to remind us, one could not be a true Christian.

Packing away a life is a slow, fragmented affair. Everyone is outlived by objects, everyone bequeaths an uncurated museum to the living.

We walked down onto the beach, following a ragged trail of debris. Seagulls had been strangled by the sea into sodden, twisted things of bones and feathers. Huge grey tree stumps, smoothed to a metallic finish, had been washed up like abandoned war-time ordnance. All along the beach, in fact, the sea had left its offerings like a cat trying to curry favour with its owner.

And then it came to him. He had been wrong about everything. God was missing. He had never been here. And if He had never been here, in this their special place, then He was nowhere at all. He tried to dismiss the thought as quickly as it had come, but it returned immediately and with more insistence as he stood there watching the gulls flocking for the crustaceans left behind, and the clouds slowly knotting into new shapes, and the parasites swarming in the carcass of some thing. It was all just machinery.

Here was the wild God who made nature heave and bellow. The violent shadow that followed Jesus through his tender ministry and could test men in an instant with water and wind. But if the weather should turn, there was nothing to be afraid of. There would be a goodness in His purging. A better world made from the wreck of the old.

It’s often hard to explain how we feel when someone close to us dies. Even to those we love. People can put on a bit of a brave front. Wilfred did pass away very unexpectedly. Maybe Mr Belderboss hasn’t quite come to terms with it yet. Grief is a peculiar business anyway and when it’s compounded with shock, it can take a wee while longer to get over it.

Things lived at the Loney as they ought to live. The wind, the rain, the sea were all in their raw states, always freshly born and feral. Nature got on with itself. Its processes of death and replenishment happened without anyone noticing apart from Hanny and me.

Hell was a place ruled by the logic of children. Schadenfreude that lasted for eternity.

I often thought there was too much time there. That the place was sick with it. Haunted by it. Time didn't leak away as it should. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along.

The poor sod. Apparently he lost it when his wife died. Ended up sectioned in some hospital near Preston, where I always imagined him painting those seascapes over and over again. The boats getting a little smaller and the clouds a little bigger each time, until there was nothing but tempest.

Outside, as well as in, Moorings felt like a place that had been repeatedly abandoned. A place that had failed.

It's gone now, demolished to make way for flats, and much lamented by those who remember it, but I always thought Saint Jude's was a monstrocity. It was a large brown brick place, built towards the end of the nineteenth century when Catholicism became fashionable again with a people that didn't do things by halves.

When I looked at Farther I saw that work and school were really no different. One merely became qualified to pass from one system to the next, that was all. Routine was a fact of life. It was life, in fact.

Like most drunks, Billy bypassed the small talk and slapped his bleeding, broken heart into my palm like a lump of raw beef.

An astonishing, curdled smell that had subtle layers of foulness for the nose to explore.

It was the same fearful excitement we felt when we happened to drive through what Mummer considered a bad part of London and found ourselves lost in a maze of terraces that sat shoulder to shoulder with industrial plants and scrapyards. We would turn in our seats and gawp out of the windows at the scruffy, staring children who had no toys but the bits of wood and metal torn off the broken furniture in their front yards where aproned women stood and screeched obscenities at the men stumbling out of corner pubs. It was a safari park of degradation.

We drove out of London, heading north through the East Midlands and across Yorkshire to Lancashire. I sat in the back with Monro wedged under my seat and slept on and off as a dozen counties went by. Every so often I woke up with the feeling that I was repeating parts of the journey. But then England is much the same all over, I suppose.

I often thought there was too much time there. That the place was sick with it. Haunted by it. Time didn’t leak away as it should. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along. It collected as the black water did on the marshes and remained and stagnated in the same way.

... the truth isn't always set in stone. In fact it never is. There are just versions of it. And sometimes it's prudent to be selective about the version you choose to give to people.

As a token bit of mysticism, the mason had fixed an Eye of God way up on the steeple, above the clock - an oval shape carved into a block of stone that I'd noticed on the old country churches Farther dragged us round at weekends. Yet at Saint Jude's, it seemed more like a sharp-eyed overseer of the factory floor, looking out for the workshy and the seditious.

In truth the prison, into which we doom Ourselves, no prison is … Wordsworth (‘Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room’)

nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise’.

You know,' he said, 'my daddy used to say that death has the timing of the world's worst comedian and I think he was right.

Living on the farms was one endless round of maintenance. Nothing was ever finished. Nothing was ever settled. Nothing. Everyone here died in the midst of repairing something. Chores and damage were inherited.

I like stories that don’t tie up, that leave you with lots of questions. An effective ending is like throwing a stone into a pond and seeing the ripples.

You know,’ he said, ‘my daddy used to say that death has the timing of the world’s worst comedian and I think he was right.

One merely became qualified to pass from one system to the next, that was all. Routine was a fact of life. It was life, in fact.

While children are routinely forced by their teachers and life in general to do things they’re not good at, by middle age many of us have figured out what our strengths and weaknesses are and have learned to stick with what we do best. We’ve found careers we’re good at; we hang out with people we like and who enjoy our company; our hobbies are things we’ve been doing for years. We are no longer, as Michael Merzenich put it, engaging our mind at the cutting edge of its abilities; we have become users of mastered skills.

But don’t let the trendiness fool you. A multitude of studies suggest that the ancient practice of mindfulness meditation actually holds promise as a way to improve cognitive abilities, to increase attention, expand working memory, and raise fluid intelligence. Some of the best are by one of the most respected psychologists in the United States, Michael Posner, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon and former chair of its psychology department.

Look first,’ he had told him. ‘And then see. Be patient and you will notice the workings of nature that most people miss.

Indeed, all his parishioners deserved to feel like Miss Bunce. Different, loved, guided and judged. It was their reward for being held to ransom by a world that demanded the right to engage in moral brinkmanship whenever it pleased.

Death was a poor draughtsman and had rendered his likeness just a little off-centre, giving him the look of someone who was almost familiar but lacking the something that made him so.

I don’t remember either of us trying to run or fight or do anything, for that matter. I only remember the smell of the wet ferns, the sound of water churning out of a gutter, the feeling of numbness, knowing that no one was coming to help us and that we were surrounded by those people Father Wilfred had always warned us about but who we never thought we’d face, not really. Those people who existed in the realm of newspaper reports; dispatches from a completely different world where people had no capacity for guilt and trampled on the weak without a second thought.

Tonto, the truth isn’t always set in stone. In fact it never is. There are just versions of it. And sometimes it’s prudent to be selective about the version you choose to give to people.’ ‘But that’s lying, Father. You said so yourself.’ ‘Then I was being as naive as you.

And that’s the trick, Tonto. Making them believe that you know what the right answer is. God knows if I’d been honest about what I knew, the whole place would have gone up in flames. They shouldn’t call us priests. Not when we’re really firemen.

Once the tables had been wiped clean, Mummer draped the dishcloth over the tap in the kitchen, Farther switched off the lights and we went out into the slush. It seemed an absurd ending to a life.

The Other world had equality now, they said, but what they meant was that everyone had the means to exhibit their own particular unpleasantness.

Hell was a place ruled by the logic of children. Schadenfreude that lasted for eternity.

death has the timing of the world’s worst comedian and I think he was right. When people die, it’s natural to regret how we treated them when they were alive. Heaven knows, there are dozens of things I wished I’d asked my mammy and daddy when they were around; times I’d like to wipe clean away. Things I wish I had or hadn’t said. It’s the worst kind of guilt, because it’s completely irreparable.

Outside, the first true warmth of the year was starting to melt the snow in the front garden. The ash trees dripped and the roofs of the cars on the driveway gave off wisps of evaporating moisture. In the sunlight, wood and stone were polished. It was almost blinding to look along the lane. But it was the birds, thought Richard. The astonishment of them. Down in the wood, they were loud with delight but also shock, as if after the long winter they had found their songs too big for their mouths and could not prevent them from spilling out across the field.

It’s a strange expression—to come to terms with death. As if there are concessions to be bargained for and won. But death takes all.

Routine was a fact of life. It was life, in fact.

I don’t believe people always want money. Not when there’s something more important to them. Money you can piss away like ale. What people really want is something that’s going to last.

Perhaps being a priest was like being a fish. Immersion for life.

Like most drunks, Billy by-passed the small talk and slapped his bleeding, broken heart into my palm like a lump of raw beef.

It was a safari park of degradation.

For a few minutes more, he looked to catch a last glimpse of the animal, but it had become one of the itinerant shadows that moved as the wind caught the trees. It had returned to patterns of living that were impossible to understand: where every movement and every sound meant something and nothing could be ignored; not the twitch of a leaf or the odor of earth or the sound of birds conversing across the wood. But Richard wondered if the hare in some way felt as he did that spring was always bestowed. That it was an invitation to come and watch the world moving and be among its tremors. Here in the field, those first shocks of the season were starting now. He could feel them and hear them. Beneath the trills and whistles of the blackbirds he became aware of a rushing sound. It was the beck flowing again, released from its rictus of ice.

The four erratic boulders were balanced on an outcrop of limestone, and though Richard had explained to Ewan how they’d got there—how they’d been inched down from Ribblehead by the glaciers thirteen thousand years ago—the boy preferred the story that Gordon had told him. That these mossy Silurian blocks were really the sons and daughters of a widower who, terrified of losing them as he had his wife, had found some means to turn them into stone and preserve them for eternity. The logic was untidy, but that didn’t matter. If you put your ear to the rock you could hear them talking. If you left a flower in one of the cracks it would be gone the next day. No, not eaten by sheep or whipped away by the wind but taken as a gift from one living child to another.

God has no time for deceivers.

Fear can make people do funny things.

That at least would have given weight to Gordon’s yarn about the tree’s ruin being a punishment for putting one of God’s creations to such brutal purpose. “You do know they used the tree for hangings, don’t you, Richard?” “Yes, Gordon.” “That’s the reason nothing grows there in your field.” “Yes, Gordon.” “There’s not an inch of soil that’s still alive.

Time had inevitably fattened the myths about Starve Acre, and yet it was undeniably sterile—most noticeably in the summertime, when all along the dale the fields belonging to the Burnsalls and Drewitts and Westburys were verdant and the Willoughbys’ plot was nothing but dry mud. In all the digging he’d done, Richard had never once turned up a single worm or spider. Only bones.

From the base of the skull, the bones arched and thickened through the lumbar region before narrowing toward the tail, which curved like the crack end of a whip. The shoulder blades were sharp and translucent. The ribs made a strong coop. But it was the hind legs that fascinated him most—the way that speed and spring still seemed ready to burst from the joints. In life, it would have been a magnificent animal.

The gist was often no different to those mawkish Victorian pamphlets that testified to heartbroken parents that all suffering was ordained. That no death was chance. That a child was always handpicked to be with God. It was hard, Richard thought, for people to accept that an event could be utterly devoid of goodness. No one wanted to admit that cruelty really existed. Which is why the letters that came to Starve Acre from second cousins and old school friends insisted that the experience of Ewan’s death would send the Willoughbys out into the rest of their lives with the sort of inner strength that was only ever forged in grief. Meaning that they were privileged in some abhorrent way.

The Raker-of-Mud The Hot-Footed-One. Jolly-Night-Drunk. Earth-on-the-Run. Piece-o-the-Dark. Lugs-in-the-Hay The Owd Duke-o-March. The Jester-o-May Twitch-in-the-Bracken Dandelion Jack Eyes-all-a-startle Marker-of-Tracks Earth-Thumper. Witch-Puppet. Lurker-at-Dusk ’Tis part of his game To vary his name.

The storm had lasted for hours and the extent of its fury was marked by icy cornices blown over the dry-stone walls. They were wild jagged crests, like those of a sea surge breaking on inadequate defenses. So the winter went on. Adding to itself day by day.

There was something about being able to say that it was March. Something in the name that suggested energetic purpose and the onward movement of things. A time to work. A time to shoulder the yoke.

On the other side of the valley, beyond the Westburys’ hayfield, the limestone terraces of Outrake Fell looked even more severe than usual with their fringes of icicles, and the Burnsalls’ sheep, which were normally left to look after themselves on the high pastures during the winter, were down in the farm. The sound of their bleating rose with the slow smoke from the cottage chimney. It was the kind of scene that Juliette had imagined before they’d come to live here. A simplicity of movements and sounds.

But it was the birds, thought Richard. The astonishment of them. Down in the wood, they were loud with delight but also shock, as if after the long winter they had found their songs too big for their mouths and could not prevent them from spilling out across the field.

Seeking an explanation for it all seemed ungrateful. A great kindness was at work here and he felt that by questioning the restoration he might jeopardize its fulfillment. He didn’t feel confused. He had witnessed what had happened and there it was. He wasn’t being asked to wonder, only observe and be awake to what he was being shown. The spring was coming. Soon, there would be only newness.

The hare had not been reborn in a pristine state of health but at the age it must have been when it died. Around the muzzle there was a grayness to the fur and it had the lean face of an animal hardened by the northern seasons. And by loneliness too. A buck hare never had a tribe to rule, he had no dark warren full of family. He lived by his own wits and in doing so acquired a deep wisdom of the world. He knew what men were, what men did.