Mike McCormack > Quotes

“I've told you before I'm not guilty of anything; I'm just guilty, that's all.”
― Mike McCormack, Notes from a Coma

“no point whatsoever meeting catastrophe with reason when what was needed was our prophets deranged and coming towards us wild-eyed and smeared with shit, ringing a bell, seer and sinner at once while speaking some language from the edge of reason whose message would translate into plain words as we’re fucked well and truly fucked”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“something that at first sight appeared to be the luminous bones of some massive, extinct creature, now disinterred, with its ribs gathered into a neat bundle around the thick stump of a massive spinal column which time and the elements had polished to such a cool ceramic gloss that if I were to leave my hand on it I would have been surprised if it felt like anything other than glass”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“her voice suddenly gone as if it had snagged on the mist and was carried off into the failing light, leaving the phone dead in my hand, a warm sliver with the screen fading like some luminous shard from outer space which had traveled across stellar distances at great speed to arrive here in my hand where its glow was now losing its heat, gone”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“the physical world gone down in flames
mountains, rivers and lakes
and pulling with it all those human rhythms that bind us together and draw the world into a community, those daily
rites, rhythms and rituals
upholding the world like solar bones, that rarefied amalgam of time and light whose extension through every minute of the day is visible from the moment I get up in the morning and stand at the kitchen window with a mug of tea in my hand,”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“I love that we’re living the kind of life where things are wearing down around us”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“you have to have faith, Dad, that's what we Mayo people do, we journey in hope, true believers”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“What no tourist bumf will tell you is that this inlet is suffused with an atmosphere of ineffable sadness. Partly a trick of the light and climatic factors, partly also the lingering residue of an historical tragedy which still resonates through rock and water down seven generations of fretful commemorative attempts and dissonant historical hermeneutics. Now think of grey shading towards gunmetal across an achromatic spectrum; think also of turbid cumulus clouds pouring down five centimeters of rainfall above the national average and you have some idea of the light reflected within the walls of this inlet. This is the type of light which lends itself to vitamin D deficiency, baseline serotonin levels, spluttering neurotransmitters and mild but by no means notional depression. It is the type of light wherein ghosts go their rounds at all hours of the day.”
― Mike McCormack, Notes From a Coma

“a gradual leaking away of all conviction”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“I stood here

in this kitchen

elaborating and embellishing this fantasy for some time instead of taking responsibility for what was happening around me because in truth what really tormented me was that all this filth and disorder offended my engineer’s sense of structure, everything out of place and proper alignment, everything gathering towards some point of chaos beyond which it would be impossible to restore the place to its proper order and yet I stood looking at it, locked into a silent battle with the house itself and all the things which were slowly vacating their proper place, furniture and dishes and cutlery all over the place, curtains hanging awry and chairs and tables strewn about while books and papers slid across the floor, everything slowly shifting through the house as if they had a meeting to keep somewhere else, possibly in some higher realm where all this chaos would resolve into a refined harmony which had no need of my hand or intervention”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“...were we so blind to the world teetering on the edge that we never straightened up from what we were doing to consider things more clearly or
have we lost completely that brute instinct for catastrophe, that
sensitivity now buried too deep beneath reason and manners to
register but which, once upon a time, was alert to the first whining
vibrations radiating from those stress points likely to give away first...”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“a county with a unique history of people starving and mortifying themselves for higher causes and principles, a political reflex that has twitched steadily down the years and seems rooted in some aggravated sense of sinfulness because, like no other county it is blistered with shrines and grottoes and prayer houses and hermitages just as it is crossed with pilgrim paths and penitential ways”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“an attractive middle-aged school teacher who was taking time out after a few hours gardening and who, even in these relaxed, unguarded moments was never far from that school-marmish neatness which she carried from her classroom and which, in the early years of our marriage, we made good use of when she would play the role of the prim schoolteacher taking it from the rough-hewn but sensitive laggard at the back of the class, bent over the table, in the hallway, wherever – neither of us claiming there was anything original about the fantasy but both of us stepping into our roles with such gusto that our energies carried us into a place where we found ourselves overtaken with a greedy appetite for each other, sometimes so intense that Mairead said she thought there was something cosmic about it and that she felt capable of fucking the world into redemption

her own words

fucking our way past the pettiness and desperation which sometimes overcame us in our day-to-day lives, so that twisted together in the act of love we found our way towards that one molten moment in which only that which was true and unsullied in us would survive, everything else burned away, leaving us truly naked with all our senses open to giving the best of ourselves to each other and to the world we had created around us, something which thankfully, happened often enough back then to allow us now, in middle age

to sit across the table from each other and reflect that we’d had our proper share of such passion, we had not short-changed that part of ourselves while

all this comes to me now in such an unbroken torrent

sitting here at this table”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“age still remembered it with wonderment, I never asked him about it, as it seemed to me his silence on the subject only added to its grandeur and I did not want to take from it in any way with questions so that”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“He once said that just bec ause you can go on at length doesn't mean that you have something to say, it doesn't mean you have a story to tell; just because you've been unlucky or short-changed or fucked over or fallen heavily on the thorns of life - that's no justification”
― Mike McCormack, Notes from a Coma

“her self-confidence was one of those markers I’ve always held up to myself as proof that I had done a decent job as a father, a true indicator that she had grown strong and self-sufficient and would not be buffeted too easily by whatever life threw at her, nor would she shirk those moments when she would have to stand her ground”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“this seemed to be that time in his life when he could suck the life out of any project no matter how promising it appeared”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“the anxious worry that I might be responsible in some way for what was on the walls of the gallery behind me, a wringing fear within me which gathered to its tight core two decades of consequence, so that it was now clear to me that this whole evening might be nothing less than a full reappraisal of myself as a man and as a father, something I had not reckoned on when I got into the car that evening and drove the sixty or seventy miles to the gallery, that I was travelling towards this moment of reckoning with myself because, like many another man, I had gone through life with little in the way of self-examination, my right to a life of peace from such persecution something I had taken for granted, something I might have acknowledged as the responsibility of others but not the type of inward harrowing I ever expected of myself but which nevertheless I now found myself subjected to in a way which took its prompt from a central, twitching nerve within me which kept asking

had I failed my daughter

had I pushed her towards this – whatever this was – on the walls of the gallery, this was the question that would not resolve one way or another beneath the sifting rain which shadowed the street in both directions, with the conviction hardening within me that having lived a decent life might not in itself be enough – or a life which till now I had honestly thought had been decent – since there was now some definite charge or accusation in the air which made it appear that not having done anything wrong was not enough”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“I have known it to be a sacred and beautiful place, hallowed by human endeavor and energies, crossed with love and the continual weave of human circumstance.”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“and it was surely the case also that only machines built to so large a scale and of such pristine alloys could bridge the span between heaven and earth with their song on our account and was she alone in these thoughts she wondered or did anyone else have similar feelings about these machines, this technology which of course they didn’t”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“Midwest Radio would like to extend their sympathies to the families and loved ones of the dead”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“I walked down the hall towards whatever bedroom she was lying in I sometimes experienced those few steps as a long journey southwards which crossed borders and time zones, traversed deserts and mountain ranges to where I would eventually find her, my quarry, stricken under a pitiless sun, gasping and parched in some benighted jurisdiction which suffered a rapid turnover of governments, spiralling inflation rates and despicable human rights records – only such radical change of topography and circumstance could account for that gaping sense of distance she inhabited during the first couple of days”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“what I found difficult was the mixture of finger pointing and sanctimony in the whole piece, your righteous standpoint over the material, I wasn't so sure about that”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“my heart clenched in my chest with a desperate love for this man who had been the hero of my life but who now was so confused he was incapable of seeing who or what was good for him”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“some things are so awful, you can't look them square in the face and some things make no sense no matter what angle you look at them from. and of course they happen in other people's lives, never in your own.”
― Mike McCormack, Notes from a Coma

“Nealon is shook. He has not foreseen any version of this meeting in which he would be sitting in a hotel foyer listening to a man unspooling his whole life in a way that made more sense coming from him than anything he himself had experienced. Such an unbroken telling of it makes him wonder how he has remained so fragmented and disordered to himself. How has he failed to see such continuance? This whole thing falls outside any idea of the life he knows as his own.”
― Mike McCormack, This Plague of Souls

“telling us that the death has occurred
in the family home
or after a long illness
or after a short illness
or suddenly
or in England
or peacefully at their home in
all the innumerable ways and places in which anyone can die”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“Being in the dark is no bad thing if the alternative is being blinded by the light.”
― Mike McCormack, This Plague of Souls