

“Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.”
― Angela’s Ashes
― Angela’s Ashes

“Ireland is still what novelist Edna O'Brien calls a "pagan place." But that paganism does not conflict with a devout Catholicism that embraces and absorbs it, in a way that can seem mysterious, even heretical, elsewhere. In Ireland, Christianity arrived without lions and gladiators, survived without autos-da-fe and Inquisitions. The old ways were seamlessly bonded to the new, so that ancient rituals continued, ancient divinities became saints, ancient holy sites were maintained just as they had been for generations and generations.”
― The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit
― The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit

“I had the impression that I was damned, even though all I had done was to be as God made me, and as I lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, I saw no difference between God’s justice and man’s injustice.”
― The Sacrament
― The Sacrament

“There was a misspelling on the headstone which the moss had not yet covered. We spoke of everything except for what was on our mind. When we left the graveyard, hand in hand, you asked: Why is it always our mistakes that linger in our memory?”
― The Sacrament
― The Sacrament
“It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wife iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.”
― Home: Recipes from Ireland
― Home: Recipes from Ireland
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