Nuala O'faolain Quotes

The wait is long, my dream of you does not end.

If there were nothing else, reading would--obviously--be worth living for.

...friendship is something you do.

..though silence must add intensity to your intimate moments, it must also shrivel your soul to lie beside someone who doesn't talk to you.

Do the thing that's less passive. Do the active thing. There's more of the human in that.

My life burned inside me. Even such as it was, it was the only record of me, and it was my only creation, and something in me would not accept that it was insignificant.

Lovers are allowed to be as cruel as anything to the one who dissappoints them.

...when I was young, I learned to feel for the harshness under every soft appearance.

Let me just say that I am not often lonely in country places. In cities I am, like the writers of the letters. Nature doesn't break your heart: other people do. Yet, we cannot live apart from each other in bowers feeding on nectar. We're in this together, this getting through our lives, as the fact that we are word-users shows.

...time is the third party to every relationship.

A bugler sounded the Last Post. Heartbreak made audible.

Permanence, I once copied down from a magazine, is what we all want when we can love and can be loved; change is what we want when we cannot.

What makes a woman into a doormat? What makes her see some quite ordinary other person as a looming Goliath? And are not these relationships such an outrage to reality that they cannot last a lifetime?

But this upland pass was the right place for remembering how, when I was young, I learned to feel for the harshness underneath every soft appearance.

When I stay with the couple who are my closest friends, I hear them laughing and talking in bed, and sometimes in the middle of the night one of them goes down and makes tea, and when the clock goes off in the morning, they start again, talking to each other.

But you know, there's one simple thing I see absolutely clearly, now that I am so very old. I looked at her. The Albert Einstein hairstyle, and the bright black eyes and the sharp nose. That pallor on her face. She put her small hand on mine. The world is wonderful, she said. All its little things. It is wonderful.

I did believe, from my experience of life and of looking at the world, that men hated women.

L'attesa lunga, il mio sogno di te non finito.

They're fathers second, Jimmy said. They're men first.

I tried not to think about it. But every so often it would burst out of me - why did he do something so unkind? What had I done to deserve it? I did believe, from my experience of life and of looking at the world, that men hated women. But there were all kinds of exceptions, and I'd have bet everything that this man didn't hate me, this woman.

There was nothing between the man and me - - nothing, not even liking. But because of the memory of some wholeness, or the hope of some regeneration, I would have dropped whatever I'd planned, just to go back to scratching around on his bed.

...Though it seemed trivial, now, to describe a place as if what is was, was what I could see of it.

Did anyone ever hear of an intelligent fantasy?

The world is wonderful, she said. All its little things. It is wonderful.

States have no goodness. They suppress these villains here and promote those villains there, with no aim but self-aggrandizement.

What is not challenged from outside is open to corruption from within. -This is the infinite value of a dissenting voice: that where it is not allowed to flourish, an institution- a school or an orphanage or a government or a media consensus....begins to slide toward allowing its worst energies into play.

In any case, I would prefer to read something I don’t enjoy than do almost anything else. I like the act of reading in itself. Following the lines of something — not just the story but the rhythm, the tone, the feel of what has accumulated from before and what is beginning to impend — becoming surefooted on the high-wire of the author’s intention.

Sean had been one of a group of people who wanted to rescue the Irish language from being a grim thing taught in schools and to reaffirm it in every area of life-in comedy, sex, cursing, drinking, everything. These men started the Brian Merriman School so that, for one week a year, anyone who wanted to could go to Clare to learn and talk and listen and sing and dance, in Irish or English, but anyway in the old Gaelic spirit.

But Ireland isn't just landscape, but history and present society. There was famine and brutality and emptiness in the country. And the damaged underclass I was part of in the afternoon pubs was as much part of Ireland as its beauty.

families hunted, finally, in 1847, from the townland of Ballykilcline, County Roscommon. He goes with them from their tumbled cabins in the bog to the square in Strokestown, where they were rounded up for the four-day journey to Dublin, and then he sails with them to Liverpool, and he accompanies them through their humiliations there, until he must leave them, where they fall out of history, as they huddle into steerage to cross the ocean to New York. It was a terrible journey. On the road to Dublin most of the ragged band were “debilitated from at least a year