Academics From Ireland

"I wish I was artistic," said Liz, "then I could be temperamental."

"You sit down to your desk and listen to what's inside your head. Things appear suddenly and unexpectedly. I don't mean it's like inspiration or anything like that but, put it this way, you are there with a 3B pencil in your hand should you hear anything good. If you are in a notion of working, the idea takes root and won't let you go. It puts out twigs and branches. These twigs get leaves and thorns and maybe, if you are lucky, blossoms. And fruit. [...] The worst thing that can happen at a time like this is an interruption. When the interruption is over it's very hard to get the same momentum going again."

"It's all going far too well," said Gerry. "A bad omen."

""Alcohol is the rubber tyres between me and the pier." He held up his glass to her. They chinked."

"A summer insect flew into the metal dome of the Anglepoise and knocked around like a tiny knuckle."

"When they finally got into the foyer there were some enlarged black and white photographs. Anne in her school playground before the war. Anne in the street with friends. Anne at a desk, writing."

"She rummaged in her bag and produced a postcard she'd bought in the museum shop. Old Woman Reading. It was not the painting she had seen but a different one. When she'd asked for the postcard the assistant had shrugged and said they were out of it. There are many old women reading, she said. The assistant had offered her another, even better, card. An old woman, cowled in some dark material, looking down at a book. It was so lovely - the concentration in the eyes, the luminescence of the ancient face reflected from the page, the interior light from reading whatever was printed there."

"He succeeded in persuading her back to look at The Jewish Bride. There was a crowd gathered around it. It was huge, big as a hoarding, a great slash of browns and yellows and reds. Two figures, a man and a woman on the edge of intimacy, or perhaps just after, about to coorie in to one another. Hands. Hands everywhere. A painting about touch. Stella joined the crowd and wormed her way to the front. Gerry watched her bite her lip as she gazed. She became aware of Gerry watching her. He excused himself and threaded his way to her side. "Well?" "There's a great tenderness in him," she said. "You can see he cherishes her." "Look at that big hand of his," Gerry said. "And the sleeve. Like a big croissant. The way he's put the paint on." "And the faces," she said. "But she's not so sure. Shy, yes. Sure, no. What sumptuous clothes." She pointed out the groom's hand around the woman's shoulder and his other hand resting on her breast. The bride's touch of the groom's hand."

"Stella found herself isolating one particular snowflake - a small one - and watching its progress. Lifting, floating, eddying upwards, sinking among the others. Dithering. Then when it went off her radar she would choose another and watch it and will it to survive for as long as possible."

"You know how vivid things are in extremis. There's something going on in the brain. Chemicals. They make the moment indelible.""

"What happened to you? You're nothing but appetite."

"On the wall above the desk was an ikon he had bought in Thessaloníki - he afterwards discovered that he had paid too much for it. It had been hanging for some months before he noticed, his attention focused by a moment of rare idleness, that Christ had a woodworm hole in the pupil of his left eye. It was inconspicuous by its position, and rather than detracting from the impact, he felt the ikon was enhanced by the authenticity of this small defect."

"He put his feet up on the mantelpiece and leaned back in the chair. He thought about how things happened to him but he brought nothing about. What he needed was self-discipline. His mother had ruled her own life with a hand of iron. She did everything she should do, getting up at seven and walking a mile to mass every day no matter what the weather; if she wanted one thing badly she did without others; if what she wanted was spiritual she denied her body. In Lent she took black tea and weighed her morsels of food on scales and for six weeks wouldn't let a sweet cross her lips although she loved them. She sent money abroad to her working sisters while at night she sat with a wooden mushroom darning her stockings with a criss-cross brown thread. She worked so her family would not want and Cal had never wanted while she was alive. He got a sense of a new life, a new start now that he had officially moved into the cottage. He would discipline himself. He felt a surge of his own power to direct his life into whatever path he wanted. There were six cigarettes left in his packet and he lit one and smoked it with a decadent pleasure, knowing it to be his last. The rest he threw into the fire."

"The coffee was good and the first sip made him want a cigarette. His hand went to his pocket before he realised it was decades since he'd had a smoke. The desire came out of nowhere. He thought how foolish, how stuck in routine the body becomes. Would the same thing happen if he tried to give up drinking?"

"I always say that a man with one language is like a man with one eye."

"Do you still want to - refuse to help?" "I'm afraid so." "Not to act - you know - is to act. By not doing anything you are helping to keep the Brits here."

"It was a way of not thinking - to concentrate on her surroundings. If she stared at things, then it helped block out stuff."

"Stella was telling the clerk that there was a Catholic church in the heart of the red-light district called 'Our Dear Lord in the Attic'. "Would there be Mass there?" "No, I do not think so." The clerk shook his head. "It is now a museum." "All religion should be in museums," Gerry said."

""The individual matters," said Mrs Gallagher."

"We went on a school trip down the Rhine one summer and I saw a crucifixion that made all others pale for me. It was a painting. And it was the first thing like that which had any effect on me. I stood and stared at it for so long the teachers lost me and had to come back for me."

""Bitter?" said the barmaid and he nodded. What a strange thing to call a drink. Bitter. Aloes. Sorrow. For something that was supposed to make you feel happy."

"It's a bad day when the biggest thing you catch is a seagull."

"What we run here, Brother, is a finishing school for the sons of the Idle Poor." "It finishes them all right."

"There's not much money - if that's what you mean." "Approximately." "Once all the debts are paid there will be very little." "Nevertheless. Every little helps. The Brothers are sorely in need of it this weather."

"He wanted to pray but couldn't because he no longer believed. Prayer was just an intense wishing."

"Believers. I mean, where have they all gone?"

"When she emptied the kettle she always filled it for the benefit of the next person."

"There's nobody can fix this but yourself. You are the only one who can make the changes."

"Sit down, son, don't loom."

"They are angry men with vision, Brother, and by God their anger is justified. Ireland has not much longer to suffer. Her misery will soon be over and we'll be a united country again." "Yes," said Brother Sebastian, "but I don't like their methods." "Nor do I, Brother. Nor do I. But do you like the methods of the British Government any better?"

"Cal, the world is full of gulpins who don't care who they hurt."

"It concentrates the mind wonderfully knowing that this [life] is all we can expect."

"Michael wondered why it was the tragic things that remained with him most vividly."

"It is disconcerting to find that an acquaintance considers you his best friend, his soul mate, but I could do nothing about it."

"On the wall above the sink was a board, with tools clipped to it. A hammer, screwdrivers - a pair of pliers, a hacksaw. And other stuff. Each item was outlined carefully in red paint. "I like your board arrangement," said Stella. "It's to remind me to put things back. If I don't, the empty ghost yells at me. So I put things back.""

"There's not much you can do in this world without people getting to know."

"Suddenly a police Land Rover with its hee-haw siren blaring swung into the main road behind them with a squeal of tyres. It roared along and overtook them so fast its body tilted at an angle to the chassis. Someone said, "Jesus, they'll sell no ice cream going at that speed.""

"In our contemporary situation we are tempted to become totally inculturated in the present, thereby losing our sense of identity as followers of Jesus Christ, overlooking the importance of memory, abandoning hope and placing all the emphasis on the here and now. We are in a season of transition, as we watch the collapse of the world as we have known it in its political forms and economic realities of the past which are becoming increasingly ineffective. It has been said by many critics of religion that the problem of our time is not atheism but idolatry. It is not that we are non-believers but that our beliefs are assigned to unworthy and unworkable objects. Today in a variety of ways the State wants to reshape our values, our fears and dreams in ways that are fundamentally opposed to the Gospel."

"Goodness, generosity and gentleness have been expressed in neighbourliness, voluntarism and the huge sacrifices made by individuals and families. Our faith will not provide easy answers, yet faith will help to provide perspective which will enable us to address the challenges."

"I remember rocking the pram with one hand and typing with the other."

"She should, in my view, make a substantial donation to the Madeleine McCann fund -- perhaps half her Booker prizewinnings of €70,000: she will be a rich woman, in any case... But I doubt she will make any such gesture, because I don't think she quite understands how much damage she has done, not just to Mr and Mrs McCann, but to the vital principle that every individual in a properly-run democracy is innocent until proved guilty. She seems to think that the unfortunate aspect was the "timing" of the piece. No, it was not. It was the substance -- and the effect."

"There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick."

"Everybody's got an opinion about her, haven't they? Even that charmless female Anne Enright couldn't just accept a fat cheque and the Man Booker Prize for her miserable novel about a large family without telling the world, totally gratuitously, that she hated Kate McCann. Her publishers should have put a large brown bag over her head immediately — because to put down someone who is guilty of no crime, except being fit and attractive, is thoroughly repellent. I urge you not to buy Enright's book until she apologises for this slur on another member of the sisterhood."

"There was a great buzz and sometimes I felt like awarding myself purple hearts for the work I was doing."

"It was lucky I was hanging around with theatre types who don't really have steady jobs."

"He, whose pleasure it was to spread the Church’s seed so far, said to east, west, north, and south, “Give”; it is not for us then to say, “Keep back.” He hath given to his Son “the heathen for his inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession.” We for our parts dare not abridge this grant, and limit this great lordship, as we conceive it may best fit our own turns, but leave it to his own latitude, and seek for the catholic Church neither in this part, nor in that piece, but, as it hath been before said in the words of the Apostle, among “all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours."

"They who talk so much of the catholic Church, but indeed stand for their own particular, must of force sink as low in uncharitableness, as they have thrust themselves deep in schism. We who talk less of the universality of the Church, but hold the truth of it, cannot find in our hearts to pass such a bloody sentence upon so many poor souls that have given their names to Christ."

"Contention arises either through error in men's judgments or else disorder in their affections. When contention does grow by error in judgment, it ceases not till men by instruction come to see wherein they err, and what it is that did deceive them; without this there is neither notice nor punishment that can establish peace in the Church."

"The ground of episcopacy is derived partly from the pattern prescribed by God in the Old Testament, and partly from the imitation thereof brought in by the apostles, and confirmed by Christ himself in the time of the New. The government of the Church of the Old Testament was committed to the priests and Levites, unto whom the ministers of the New do now succeed; in like sort as our Lord’s Day hath done unto their Sabbath, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, touching the vocation of the Gentiles, “I will take of them for priests, and for Levites, saith the Lord.”"

"It is a strange thing to me, that wise men should make such large discourses of the catholic Church, and bring so many testimonies to prove the universality of it, and not discern, that, while by this means they think they have gotten a great victory over us, they have in very truth overthrown themselves."