Peadar Ó Guilín > Quotes

“She says, "I'm going to live. And nobody's going to stop me." She believes every word of it.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Call

“They drink from streams whose waters taste like tears, and indeed each swallow fills them with a few heartbeats of deep sadness.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Call

“Stupid men, always thinking they're the ones who get to do the rescuing.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Deserter

“There were the talking squiggles he'd seen in the crashed Globe too - writing, it was called - and it covered every surface, as if in this mass of people a man could be so lonely as to want to speak to the buildings.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Deserter

“Plenty come back from the Grey Land with a taste for blood. But any kind of horror will do that for you. It takes decades to breed a war out of a people that went through it.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Invasion

“Changing words isn't so hard. Recognizing a particular sound, swapping it for another - that was easy even for your ancestors. Reading what happens in your head and the heads of all the beings around you, now that is difficult. Finding equivalents in one culture for the basic concepts of another - that is really difficult. I say the word vegetable and the translator tells you something like 'edible moss'. So, yes, it's a miracle, but it's a dangerous miracle. It makes you think you understand beasts and you never do. When it comes down to it, you can't even understand your own species.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Inferior

“The redhead shrugs. She doesn't care. And neither should Nessa. Not if she wants to live.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Call

“She has suffered enough horror to realize how fragile happiness is, how eager the universe is to take it away.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Deserter

“She was pregnant, of course: pregnant women carried out all the Tribe's sacred rituals.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Inferior

“His stutter didn't like the idea of wooing and silenced any attempts to broach the subject.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Inferior

“We could make the thief’s arms longer and put suckers on them like that boy from before, do you remember? I made a trellis of him and kissed you to the music of his tears.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Invasion

“Your blood flowed out of you
And I didn't try to clean it
But drank it from my palms”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Call

“Listen, we don't need the Sídhe to teach us evil. We were the ones who put them in the Grey Land, remember? And not for just a day or however long the Call lasts. We Irish...we trapped an entire race of people in hell for all eternity just so we could take their homes for ourselves.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Call

“As a survivor, she doesn't need to speak that language anymore. But many like her are more comfortable in it than English, and since they have no choice but to marry each other, the primary schools of the country are filling with tiny tots whose innocent mouths spout the long-dead language of their distant ancestors, which also happens to be the living, never-changing tongue of the enemy. Some day, she thinks, we will be them, a greater victory for the Sídhe than if they kill us all.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Call

“At least half of his hunters writhed on the ground with grubs already inside them, causing horrendous agony. These had to be helped away by terrified Ship People whose courage lay trembling in their hearts as lightly as leaves.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Volunteer

“His losses of the past few weeks are suddenly irrelevant, because this is the only test that anybody in the country cares about. And he is ready to face it.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Call

“The two brothers looked so alike now and their faces seemed to ripple under the weight of powerful emotions. Hatred, love, violence and fear. The crowd stepped back to form a circle, as though they might be caught between falling buildings.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Volunteer

“We always keep our word,' the Sídhe replies. 'The power of a promise is all that keeps our two worlds together.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Call

“But although she is terrified by what she thinks he will do to her - what he must do, to avoid losing the last of his authority - Nessa is a girl who imagines a great destiny for herself: survival. She will fight anyone who threatens to steal it from her. Most especially, she will fight her weaker self. The self that copies other people's poetry and pines for boy who doesn't care. The self that wants her to run like a startled rabbit for the pleasure of the wolves.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Call

“I am not a cruel man. Not at all! I will pray for you – entire decades of the rosary! Although God cannot hear us in hell. Or is this just purgatory, do you think? With somewhere even worse waiting for us?”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Invasion

“It looks a little cruel,' says Conor. 'I don't like cruelty.'

'Oh, I think you do. I think you like it very much. But where you live, amid such constant beauty, those who appreciate suffering must pretend otherwise even to themselves.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Call

“I've hated some of them too. Most of them sometimes. And they do think differently, but that's a good thing, isn't it? A hand isn't a f-foot, but I need them both to hunt.”
― Peadar Ó Guilín, The Volunteer