Anne Griffin > Quotes

“No one, no one really knows loss until it’s someone you love. The deep-down kind of love that holds on to your bones and digs itself right in under your fingernails, as hard to budge as the years of compacted earth. And when it’s gone … it’s as if it’s been ripped from you. Raw and exposed, you stand dripping blood all over the good feckin’ carpet. Half-human, half-dead, one foot already in the grave.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“I’m here to remember – all that I have been and all that I will never be again.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“I only ever wanted to belong to one person and she wasn’t in that room. And in my heart I knew that even if I was a man comfortable with all the small talk it would take to break into that new life, I didn’t want it. I simply did not want it.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“of the Irish kind, reserved and embarrassed”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“Being understood without having to explain and not having to pretend all is fine. Being allowed to be a feckin’ mess. The feeling of his pat on my back as he passes behind me to go to the jax. Is it too much to ask for a simple resurrection?”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“The ‘if onlys’ tore at me in the day and in the suffocation of the night. Dragging on my breath and haunting my dreams.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“I never asked her how she coped losing the person she knew best. The person who accepted her humanity and all the failings that came with it. The person who loved her unconditionally. The person whose hand was always there to hold. I wish now I had.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“It’s an awful thing, to witness your mother cry. You cannot cure nor mend nor stick a plaster on.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“And as for Irish men. I've news for you, it's worse as you get older. It's like we tunnel ourselves deeper into our aloneness. Solving our problems on our own. Men, sitting alone at bars going over and over the same old territory in their heads.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“I nod, swirl the last drop at the bottom of my glass, before downing it. Ready now to begin the first of five toasts: five toasts, five people, five memories. I push my empty bottle back across the bar to her. And as her hand takes it and turns away, happy to have something to do, I say under my breath: ‘I’m here to remember – all that I have been and all that I will never be again.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“While my parents had long given up coaxing and pushing me out the door, Tony never stopped telling me I was full of greatness. People didn’t really do that back then, encourage and support. You were threatened into being who you were supposed to be.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“No one, no one really knows loss until it’s someone you love. The deep-down kind of love that holds on to your bones and digs itself right in under your fingernails, as hard to budge as the years of compacted earth. And when it’s gone … it’s as if it’s been ripped from you. Raw and exposed, you stand dripping blood all over the good feckin’ carpet. Half-human, half-dead, one foot already in the grave.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“Men, in particular, get a lot of stick for not pulling their weight in that quarter. And as for Irish men. I’ve news for you, it’s worse as you get older. It’s like we tunnel ourselves deeper into our aloneness. Solving our problems on our own. Men, sitting alone at bars going over and over the same old territory in their heads. Sure, if you were sitting right beside me, son, you’d know none of this. I wouldn’t know where to start. It’s all grand up here in my head but to say it out loud to the world, to a living being? It’s not like we were reared to it. Or taught it”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“What I didn’t know until after he died was that my mother had watched her younger brother Jimmy die of the same thing. People didn’t talk much of things like that in those days. Death and illness were sacred and silent, not to be stoked and stirred.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“People didn’t really do that back then, encourage and support. You were threatened into being who you were supposed to be.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“It’s an awful thing, to witness your mother cry. You cannot cure nor mend nor stick a plaster on. It is rotten. I wanted to tear out the pain of it.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“Loss – what does he know about it, I ask you? He’s barely out of nappies for Christ’s sake. I’d say the closest he’s ever come to loss was his virginity, and even at that I can’t be sure he’s old enough. No one, no one really knows loss until it’s someone you love. The deep-down kind of love that holds on to your bones and digs itself right in under your fingernails, as hard to budge as the years of compacted earth. And when it’s gone … it’s as if it’s been ripped from you. Raw and exposed, you stand dripping blood all over the good feckin’ carpet. Half”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“she turned away from me for weeks on end. Not wanting to try any more, exhausted by our collective failure. And so, the silence grew stronger and wider and took us over until there was nothing to say over the teacups of an evening.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“We have an unwritten rule now, Him and me. He lets me live my life as I see fit and in return I say the odd quiet prayer in my head. Our gentleman's agreement works.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“The company of the trusted, what? Being understood without having to explain and not having to pretend all is fine. Being allowed to be a feckin’ mess.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“Loneliness, that fecker again, wreaking his havoc on us mortals. It’s worse than any disease, gnawing away at our bones as we sleep, plaguing our minds when awake.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“check doesn’t do any harm. I’d finished having the chat with Francie and was heading back to the Jeep at the far end of the field when I saw Robert’s Range Rover pull up. I watched him get out and walk over to my Jeep and lean his back against my”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“There was a love but of the Irish kind, reserved and embarrassed by its own humanity.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“But I wonder in those years after my father died, when she had her mind, how she dealt with his passing. I never asked her how she coped losing the person she knew best. The person who accepted her humanity and all the failings that came with it. The person who loved her unconditionally. The person whose hand was always there to hold. I wish now I had.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“her voice like a radio in the background for that five-mile drive to Noreen, comforting and welcome but to which the rest of us paid little attention.”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“no one, not my mother or father or”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said

“The thing I miss most about Jason is not what he said or did,’ she says, her hand long gone from mine, lying flat against her chest now, ‘it was his very breath, beside me in the room or the next room or somewhere in this place, I didn’t care. It was simply knowing he was there, that meant the world to me. I didn’t need him to do anything other than just be alive. Is it the same for you?”
― Anne Griffin, When All Is Said