Andrew Michael Hurley > Quotes

“I often thought there was too much time there. That the place was sick with it. Haunted by it. Time didn't leak away as it should. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along. It collected as the black water did on the marshes and remained and stagnated in the same way.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Hell was a place ruled by the logic of children.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“What you go searching for and what you find aren't always the same.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre

“Pity is the only thing a drunk has in abundance.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Life here arose of its own accord and for no particular reason. It went unexamined, and died unremembered.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“not noticing, or wilfully ignoring, the look of horror that Mummer tried to slide discreetly his way, as though on a folded piece of paper. Without”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“The will of Richard's father had been to ensure that his son was in no doubt that a church was merely a meeting place for the mentally ill, and that all who gathered there--priest and parishioners--were like fearful, asinine schizophrenics. There was no God, no devil, no heaven or hell, no posthumous judgment for wickedness or reward for piety; there was no resurrection, no transfiguration, no illimitable bliss, no life everlasting. The sum of human existence was collagen and calcium phosphate. And then nothing.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre

“It was a safari park of degradation. What a world without God looked like.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Father Wilfred had told us time and time again that it was our duty as Christians to see what our faith had taught us to see. And consequently Mummer used to come home from the shop with all kinds of stories about how God had seen fit to reward the good and justly punish the wicked. The lady who worked at the bookmakers had developed warts on her fingers from handling dirty money all day long. The Wilkinson girl, who had visited the clinic on the Finchley Road that the women at Saint Jude’s talked about in hushed tones, had been knocked down by a car not a week later and had her pelvis snapped beyond repair. Conversely, an elderly lady who came into the shop every week for prayer cards and had spent much of the previous decade raising money for Cafod, won a trip to Fatima.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Hell was a place ruled by the logic of children. Schadenfreude that lasted for eternity.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Decisions made without sentiment about what was junk and what was useful. Packing away a life is a slow, fragmented affair. Everyone is outlived by objects, everyone bequeaths an uncurated museum to the living.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Devil's Day

“Routine was a fact of life. It was life, in fact.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Like most drunks, Billy by-passed the small talk and slapped his bleeding, broken heart into my palm like a lump of raw beef.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“The storm had lasted for hours and the extent of its fury was marked by icy cornices blown over the dry-stone walls. They were wild jagged crests, like those of a sea surge breaking on inadequate defenses. So the winter went on. Adding to itself day by day.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre

“I often thought there was too much time there. That the place was sick with it. Haunted by it. Time didn't leak away as it should. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Time had inevitably fattened the myths about Starve Acre, and yet it was undeniably sterile—most noticeably in the summertime, when all along the dale the fields belonging to the Burnsalls and Drewitts and Westburys were verdant and the Willoughbys’ plot was nothing but dry mud. In all the digging he’d done, Richard had never once turned up a single worm or spider. Only bones.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre

“I don’t remember either of us trying to run or fight or do anything, for that matter. I only remember the smell of the wet ferns, the sound of water churning out of a gutter, the feeling of numbness, knowing that no one was coming to help us and that we were surrounded by those people Father Wilfred had always warned us about but who we never thought we’d face, not really. Those people who existed in the realm of newspaper reports; dispatches from a completely different world where people had no capacity for guilt and trampled on the weak without a second thought.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Hell was a place ruled by the logic of children. Schadenfreude that lasted for eternity.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“The gist was often no different to those mawkish Victorian pamphlets that testified to heartbroken parents that all suffering was ordained. That no death was chance. That a child was always handpicked to be with God. It was hard, Richard thought, for people to accept that an event could be utterly devoid of goodness. No one wanted to admit that cruelty really existed. Which is why the letters that came to Starve Acre from second cousins and old school friends insisted that the experience of Ewan’s death would send the Willoughbys out into the rest of their lives with the sort of inner strength that was only ever forged in grief. Meaning that they were privileged in some abhorrent way.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre

“For a few minutes more, he looked to catch a last glimpse of the animal, but it had become one of the itinerant shadows that moved as the wind caught the trees. It had returned to patterns of living that were impossible to understand: where every movement and every sound meant something and nothing could be ignored; not the twitch of a leaf or the odor of earth or the sound of birds conversing across the wood. But Richard wondered if the hare in some way felt as he did that spring was always bestowed. That it was an invitation to come and watch the world moving and be among its tremors. Here in the field, those first shocks of the season were starting now. He could feel them and hear them. Beneath the trills and whistles of the blackbirds he became aware of a rushing sound. It was the beck flowing again, released from its rictus of ice.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre

“The Raker-of-Mud The Hot-Footed-One. Jolly-Night-Drunk. Earth-on-the-Run. Piece-o-the-Dark. Lugs-in-the-Hay The Owd Duke-o-March. The Jester-o-May Twitch-in-the-Bracken Dandelion Jack Eyes-all-a-startle Marker-of-Tracks Earth-Thumper. Witch-Puppet. Lurker-at-Dusk ’Tis part of his game To vary his name.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre

“There was something about being able to say that it was March. Something in the name that suggested energetic purpose and the onward movement of things. A time to work. A time to shoulder the yoke.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre

“But it was the birds, thought Richard. The astonishment of them. Down in the wood, they were loud with delight but also shock, as if after the long winter they had found their songs too big for their mouths and could not prevent them from spilling out across the field.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre

“Living on the farms was one endless round of maintenance. Nothing was ever finished. Nothing was ever settled. Nothing. Everyone here died in the midst of repairing something. Chores and damage were inherited.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Devil's Day

“The monks didn't like to go up on to the moors. There was something unwholesome about the place, they said. There were strange shapes far off on the ridges and sometimes noises under the peat. When they came to collect kindling and fuel for the abbey's fireplaces, they wouldn't go too deep into the Wood either. There was something worse than the wolves in there, something that always seemed determined to follow them out into the open.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Devil's Day

“Packing away a life is a slow, fragmented affair. Everyone is outlived by objects, everyone bequeaths an uncurated museum to the living.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Devil's Day

“autumn. I quite envy them really, the simple vessels they have to fill.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Devil's Day

“And then it came to him. He had been wrong about everything. God was missing. He had never been here. And if He had never been here, in this their special place, then He was nowhere at all. He tried to dismiss the thought as quickly as it had come, but it returned immediately and with more insistence as he stood there watching the gulls flocking for the crustaceans left behind, and the clouds slowly knotting into new shapes, and the parasites swarming in the carcass of some thing. It was all just machinery.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“We walked down onto the beach, following a ragged trail of debris. Seagulls had been strangled by the sea into sodden, twisted things of bones and feathers. Huge grey tree stumps, smoothed to a metallic finish, had been washed up like abandoned war-time ordnance. All along the beach, in fact, the sea had left its offerings like a cat trying to curry favour with its owner.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“The hare had not been reborn in a pristine state of health but at the age it must have been when it died. Around the muzzle there was a grayness to the fur and it had the lean face of an animal hardened by the northern seasons. And by loneliness too. A buck hare never had a tribe to rule, he had no dark warren full of family. He lived by his own wits and in doing so acquired a deep wisdom of the world. He knew what men were, what men did.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre