Cindy Brandner > Quotes

“only that sometimes, those that love us best don’t necessarily understand us best—they mean well, but they are so accustomed to us, that maybe they don’t always pay attention in the ways that are needed, aye?”
― Cindy Brandner, Spindrift

“Don’t expect life to be fair an’, Paddy, for God’s sake, don’t ever give all yer love to just one thing.”
― Cindy Brandner, Exit Unicorns

“You think it is a mistake, Fräulein, that the part of the clock that allows us to read the time are called hands? It is our attempt to grasp and hold that which cannot be caught.” During”
― Cindy Brandner, Exit Unicorns

“He understood finally that there were no absolute triumphs in any battle worth the blood, because such a fight always took something away before it bestowed victory’s thorny crown.”
― Cindy Brandner, Flights of Angels

“Love is irrevocable, it cannot be taken back. Stars may fall from the sky, men may walk on the moon and toast may burn in the morning but love will always exist in the moment it is given. Irrevocably.”
― Cindy Brandner, Exit Unicorns

“When I queried the universe as to whether there was an invisible sign out there that had denoted me as a flophouse for the world’s strays, she asked me if I considered her such. She has not learned the art of coyness, therefore I knew it was an honest question and so I answered it in kind. “No, you are not a stray, Pamela. You are my friend.” “Thank you,” she said back to me, with the grave look that penetrates right through to my soul. What I did not add was that it is myself who is the stray, and that someday she will be old enough to know that. For now I am grateful for her ignorance. When I queried the universe as to whether there was an invisible sign out there that had denoted me as a flophouse for the world’s strays, she asked me if I considered her such. She has not learned the art of coyness, therefore I knew it was an honest question and so I answered it in kind. “No, you are not a stray, Pamela. You are my friend.” “Thank you,” she said back to me, with the grave look that penetrates right through to my soul. What I did not add was that it is myself who is the stray, and that someday she will be old enough to know that. For now I am grateful for her ignorance.”
― cindy brandner

“It is said that man is the only beast that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. Here today we know how things ought to be, we can see the future, it may be a distant light but we can see it.” He paused for breath as the morning air rippled past his face, chill with the season and thought he felt, in passing, the warmth of his father’s hand upon his head.”
― Cindy Brandner, Exit Unicorns

“The goddamn Irish, they say, all they know is hate. Well I ask ye, Corporal, who taught it to us, who made sure it was bred deep into the bone an’ blood of us?”
― Cindy Brandner , Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears

“all of human experience existed as much in this small village as it did in larger towns,”
― Cindy Brandner, In the Country of Shadows

“Honour, he reflected, might be a virtue, but it tasted like ashes in a man's mouth.”
― Cindy Brandner, Where Butterflies Dream

“When I queried the universe as to whether there was an invisible sign out there that had denoted me as a flophouse for the world’s strays, she asked me if I considered her such. She has not learned the art of coyness, therefore I knew it was an honest question and so I answered it in kind. “No, you are not a stray, Pamela. You are my friend.” “Thank you,” she said back to me, with the grave look that penetrates right through to my soul. What I did not add was that it is myself who is the stray, and that someday she will be old enough to know that. For now I am grateful for her ignorance.”
― Cindy Brandner, Flights of Angels

“She rested her face against the glass of the window, wondering why no one ever saw fit to prepare you for age, to tell you that the emotions would still be young, that the heart would still hurt, that the soul would long to flee the aging bones and skin and that that would be the damnation of age, unable to escape the prison of traitorous flesh. Unable to quit yearning for that which was no longer possible.”
― Cindy Brandner, Exit Unicorns

“is natural. I have found this time of year to be a liminal space—that place between what was and what comes next. There is a quiet in these days winding down from the solstice toward the new year. We celebrate but we also”
― Cindy Brandner, Where Butterflies Dream

“There was no trial and error as far as the government was concerned there was only the trial of error upon error.”
― Cindy Brandner, Exit Unicorns

“opening the tackle box took out antiseptic and applying it liberally to the cloth, put it back on Pat’s head.”
― Cindy Brandner, Exit Unicorns

“He listened to the next stream of invective and then voiced his doubt as to the likelihood of St. Colman actually putting boils on the arse of the man who’d been unfortunate enough to deliver warped beams to Casey Riordan, being that the saint in question was responsible for hanged men, horned cattle and horses.”
― Cindy Brandner, Where Butterflies Dream

“The butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough.”
― Cindy Brandner, Where Butterflies Dream

“He believed in a system, a world if ye will where a man is not judged by the cut of his clothes or the color of his skin nor the size of his wallet. A world where truth is not to be feared, he believed,” Pat took a deep breath and looked directly into the eyes of his Muse, “that all men should live free and that freedom is worth any price.”
― Cindy Brandner, Exit Unicorns

“The older generation scratched their heads, long comfortable in misery or ignorance now, they’d lost their need to rock the boat. Rocking the boat got you drowned, plain and simple. Unionists out and out accused the emergent civil rights movement of merely being Republican foot soldiers in camouflage. The government dismissed them as rabble-rousers, agitators seeking their fifteen minutes of fame. The students with the wisdom of youth ignored all imprecations and sallied forth under ban, under the blow of rock and baton, coming up repeatedly against the hard, ugly face of hatred. They were the flame that would be put to the tinder of sectarianism and old hatreds, caught in the headiness of that year, of that dying, burning decade, they did not see that regardless of who sets the fire all who touch it will be burned and bear the scars for it.”
― Cindy Brandner, Exit Unicorns

“Automatically, as it had begun to do in these situations, her brain separated itself, like taking a box out of a box, leaving the original in its place and moving the latter over parallel to the original, though slightly askew. Photographer versus wife, picture taker versus the woman who wanted to scream in the street, who wanted to take the rifles these olive boys wore slung so casually over shoulders and narrow hips and turn them on their owners. And so the entire scene, (five minutes in real time, eternity on celluloid) laid itself out for her in freeze frame. Click, Casey cuffed now to the side of the lorry, morning light washing him over rose and silver and gold, half-naked and barefoot in the street; an Irish man in an Irish street in the twentieth century, hard to countenance and yet there for the clicking, there for the taking. Take the shot, take the picture, leave the pain, it interferes with the work, work now, bleed on the weekends, in the nights, in the quiet, that’s what Lucas had taught her.”
― Cindy Brandner, Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears

“Maybe every child abandoned to the cruelties of the world, every child left, abused, neglected, was somehow frozen in that place where first they had known the pain the world could inflict on the young, the fragile, the deserted. And if they could not find shelter soon enough, perhaps they were stranded on the shores of Neverland forever, where the Captain Hooks and the crocodiles were all too real.”
― Cindy Brandner, Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears

“It had never been the world’s greatest or most reliable car, but it had been through a great deal with her—including babies, getting shot, transporting a British spy and on one rather memorable occasion, going through a roadblock with an IRA member in the boot.”
― Cindy Brandner, Where Butterflies Dream

“Let no man dare, when I am dead, to charge me with dishonor; let no man attaint my memory by believing that I could have engaged in any cause but that of my country’s liberty and independence...”
― Cindy Brandner, Exit Unicorns

“The morning was shrouded in mist. Crouched in a ditch just northeast of Noah Murray’s farm, David Kendall, secret agent, thought the espionage business was nowhere near as glamorous as Hollywood and spy novels made it out to be. In fact, it was fucking miserable most times, especially when you had slept the night in a ditch and been wakened by an inquisitive sheep, blaaa-ting in your ear just as the dawn broke. Then you had to piss in a bottle because you couldn’t afford to venture out of said ditch. All in all, not terribly glamorous.”
― Cindy Brandner, Flights of Angels

“From the time I was born, I’ve been surrounded by people who had to be strong everyday just to survive. They had to be hard in mind an’ in heart to get from one year to the next. An’ ye’ve seen my back, I’ve known hatred, come to understand it well an’ promised myself I’d never be vulnerable to it again. But I’d no idea that love could make ye ten times more open to destruction. I’ve had men beat me until I was certain there was only a minute or two left between me an’ the grave an’ yet the fists an’ the knives never hurt the way it does when I think of losin’ ye.”
― Cindy Brandner, Exit Unicorns

“When the law makers are the law breakers, there is no law,”
― Cindy Brandner, Exit Unicorns

“Above her head, silky soft and smelling of heartbreak, the moon was fading, its pearls ground to powder and he knew with a terrible certainty that he was never going to be able to find unicorns on it again.”
― Cindy Brandner, Exit Unicorns

“hatred, while a great motivator, tends to get in the way of any genuine progress”
― Cindy Brandner, Exit Unicorns