Michael Crummey > Quotes

“He wasn’t a religious man but a vision of what Paradise might be came to him, a windowed room afloat on an endless sea, walls packed floor to ceiling with all the books ever written or dreamed of. It was nearly enough to make giving up the world bearable.”
― Michael Crummey, Galore

“From what I have seen of the world, Reverend, motherhood is a certainty, but fatherhood is a subject of debate.”
― Michael Crummey, Galore

“Through the month of December, the radio was slowly strangled by Christmas Carols”
― Michael Crummey, Sweetland

“The two women watched each other, both so still they might have been a single figure reflected in a mirror.”
― Michael Crummey, The Adversary

“He hated confronting those lost moments, being presented with some detail from his past and having to look on it like a stranger. It made his life feel like a made-up thing. A net full of holes.”
― Michael Crummey, Sweetland

“The fortress walls are useless, it said, The Adversary is already within.”
― Michael Crummey, The Adversary

“There was a killing sickness on the shore that winter and the only services at the church were funerals.”
― Michael Crummey, The Adversary

“They never lost their way or seemed even momentarily uncertain of their location. They traveled narrow paths cut through tuckamore and bog or took shortcuts along the shoreline, chancing the unpredictable sea ice. Every hill and pond and stand of trees, every meadow and droke for miles was named and catalogued in their heads. At night they navigated by the moon and stars or by counting outcrops and valleys or by the smell of spruce and salt water and wood smoke. It seemed to Newman they had an additional sense lost to modern men for lack of use.”
― Michael Crummey, Galore

“The bare rafters straining against the wind like the timbers of a vessel at sea.”
― Michael Crummey, The Adversary

“The sparse choir murdered a few hymns”
― Michael Crummey, Sweetland

“He was struck by the sensation she’d made it happen in some way, that his life was simply a story the old woman was making up in her head.”
― Michael Crummey, Galore

“A life was no goddamn thing in the end, he thought. Bits and pieces of make-believe cobbled together to look halfways human, like some stick-and-rag doll meant to scare crows out of the garden. No goddamn thing at all.”
― Michael Crummey

“Levi’s motives were never quite as obvious. There was an Old Testament ruthlessness about him, Shambler thought, something inscrutably tribal at the root.”
― Michael Crummey, Galore

“Mary Tryphena said, It's the only thing the world gives us, you know. The right to say yes or no to love.”
― Michael Crummey, Galore

“The plateau was dotted with massive granite boulders that Jesse claimed were called erratics, dropped there by retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age.”
― Michael Crummey, Sweetland

“He was a tree stump of a man, limited in his outlook but rooted and unshakeable in his certainties.”
― Michael Crummey, Galore

“He’d almost forgotten how much he loved the cigarettes, what a poisonous comfort they were.”
― Michael Crummey, Sweetland

“It was a riddle to see a person could get what they wanted and regret it, could even regret wanting it in the first place.”
― Michael Crummey, The Innocents

“A body must bear what can't be helped.”
― Michael Crummey, The Innocents

“If you scald your arse, Sweetland’s mother used to say, you got to learn to sit on your blisters. He said, “I got what was coming to me, I expect.”
― Michael Crummey, Sweetland

“The open spaces are almost too raw to take in — lidless eyes of blackwater flashes, caribou moss sodden and spongy as a lung. It's as if the landscape's insides are all on the surface. Exposed stone cracked by millennia of frost, fractures that weren't properly set leaving a permanent hitch in the country's gait. Even as you walk its naked spine you can feel the island limping away from you.”
― Michael Crummey, Passengers

“He couldn't decided whether it bothered him most to think the sailors' tale might be true or to think it was spacious in every detail and passed around as God's word regardless. The death of a horse if the life of a crow and a story was a rank scavenger from all he could tell, feeding on rumour and innuendo and naked confabulation where the truth was too nimble to chase down or too tough to chew.”
― Michael Crummey, The Innocents

“Her father used to say The death of a horse is the life of a crow, and Ada had never really taken in the meaning of the phrase. But she knew it in her bones now.”
― Michael Crummey, The Innocents

“With a rage he mistook for certainty...”
― Michael Crummey, Galore

“It was confounding to see magic and beauty and mystery leach out of a thing, to think it could be used up like a store of winter supplies.”
― Michael Crummey, The Innocents

“Pleasure and shame. Shame and pleasure. These were the world’s currencies. And it paid out both in equal measure.”
― Michael Crummey, The Innocents

“The open spaces are almost too raw to take in — lidless eyes of blackwater flashes, caribou moss sodden and spongy as a lung. It's as if the landscape's insides are all on the surface. Exposed stone cracked by millennia of frost, fractures that weren't properly set leaving a permanent hitch in the country's gait. Even as you walk its naked spine you can feel the island limping away from you. TRANSTRÖMER ON BRIMSTONE HEAD 1.”
― Michael Crummey, Passengers

“They had all their lives been the one thing the other looked to first and last, the one article needed to feel complete whatever else was taken from them or mislaid in the dark. But each in their own way was beginning to doubt their pairing was requisite to what they might want from life.”
― Michael Crummey, The Innocents

“If you scald your arse, Sweetland’s mother used to say, you got to learn to sit on your blisters. He said, “I got what was coming”
― Michael Crummey, Sweetland

“The Priddles were Irish twins, the second born ten months after the first, and”
― Michael Crummey, Sweetland