A Selection of Quotes that I've Enjoyed Recently

Life will break you.  Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.  You have to love.  You have to feel.  It is the reason we are here on earth.  You are here to risk your heart.  You are here to be swallowed up.  And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.  Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.  

Louise Erdrich

It makes sense that if you stand almost daily in the middle of a perfect crescent of shore, with a vista open to eternity, you'll conceive of possibility differently from someone raised in a wooded valley or among the canyons of a big city.  

 Claire Messud

The Woman  Upstairs

pg. 16

We were overwhelmed by the enormity of the tasks ahead.  Mary had given us a bottle of milk and a spoonful of loose tea, and so, unable to decide what to do, we did what all Irish men and women do: we had tea.  

Niall Williams & Christine Breen

O Come Ye Back to Ireland

pg. 13

You can get a feeling in parts of the West of Ireland that you are the first man and first woman anywhere.  You come upon places so remote and mystifying, so wind-lashed and sea-tossed, so rocky or so green they overwhelm your senses.  Nature fills the silence with the crash and foaming of Atlantic waves, the shrill crying of seabirds, the flapping of different winds meeting amid the mountains.  It makes you aware of your littleness, quietening you in a way nothing else can.  When you come upon one of these places you never want to leave; and yet you want to leave suddenly, to shout out, to share with the world the place that has become part of you.  

Niall Williams & Christine Breen

O Come Ye Back to Ireland

pg. 217

On the clear silver-frosted nights of November, the very air of evening sparkled with crispness.  Gathering hurried armfuls of turf from the haybarn, I felt the shimmering cold of the stars themselves in the night sky.  So little is ever said of the skies of Ireland, and yet between the majestic cloudscapes - bruised blue-gray thunderheads, mists and fogs of every variety, scudding lighter-than-light fluff balls, strands and veils and sweeps and sprawls of cloud - and the moony, starry night skies over bog and mountain, it is so much a part of landscape.  

Niall Williams & Christine Breen

When Summer's In The Meadow

pg. 134-135

In the old blue Peugeot, thinking music and talking weather, we took our favorite road from Kiltumper - westwards to the ocean, then north by the rocks at Quilty.  Driving by the edge of the Atlantic, the roads were so empty and sea-swept they seemed to run precariously along some middle world, a salty misted winter's place between land and sea.  This was the west of Ireland, and here upon the western edge of Clare, as much as in the magical counties of Kerry and Connemara, Sligo, and Donegal, the shape and feel of the landscape evoked that special feeling that was all wildness and wind, a kind of tossed and solitary beauty that staggered and silenced the heart even as you drove through it.  

Niall Williams & Christine Breen

When Summer's In The Meadow

pg. 178-179