Doireann Ní Ghríofa > Quotes

“This is a female text, composed by folding someone else's clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores.

This is a female text, born of guilt and desire, stitched to a soundtrack of nursery rhymes.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“Literature composed by women was stored not in books but in female bodies, living repositories of poetry and song. I have come across a line of argument in my reading, which posits that, due to the inherent fallibility of memory and the imperfect human vessels that held it, the Caoineadh cannot be considered a work of single authorship. Rather, the theory goes, it must be considered collage, or, perhaps, a folky reworking of older keens. This, to me --- in the brazen audacity of one positioned far from the tall walls of the university --- feels like a male assertion pressed upon a female text. After all, the etymology of the word ‘text’ lies in the Latin verb ‘texere’: to weave, to fuse, to braid. The Caoineadh form belongs to a literary genre worked and woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies, a phenomenon that seems to me cause for wonder and admiration, rather than suspicion of authorship.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“As everyone else dreamed, my eyes were open in the dark.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“Remember this lesson: in every page there are undrawn women, each waiting in her own particular silence.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“In choosing to carry a pregnancy, a woman gives of her body with a selflessness so ordinary that it goes unnoticed, even by herself.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“We cannot know from whose mouths the echoes of our lives will chime.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“I keep a list as close as my phone, and draw a deep sense of satisfaction each time I strike a task from it. In such erasure lies joy. No matter how much I give of myself to household chores, each of the rooms under my control swiftly unravels itself again in my aftermath, as though a shadow hand were already beginning the unwritten lists of my tomorrows…”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“Everything repeated and repeated again. My family had lived within these hills for centuries. I knew that there had been many other girls who had made their homes on this ground before me, girls who were grown now and gone into the ground themselves, their babies - my great-grandmothers - grown and gone the same way. Nothing I knew was ever truly new; every path I followed had been written by the bodies of others, the course of every track sculpted by the footfall of those who came before us.
For-ev-er. For-ev-er. To the well. To the haggart. To the shed. To the hill. Along these ways, grassed hummed their old tunes, blackthorns pointed their warnings, and every well held the memory of whispered human desire. Maybe I was a strange child, feeling the constant hum of the past just beyond me, real as a bee, or maybe every child shares that feeling. All I knew was that I felt safe there, in the echo of their company.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“I don’t know what it’s all for, but I keep going anyway, in the misguided hope that if I can simply exhaust my obsession it might come to bore me, eventually. It’s a foolish approach that only makes things worse, because the more I read, the sharper my rage grows.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“Swift, the twist from ordinary to catastrophe.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“She read and read, because she had woken these voices, and to stop reading would silence them.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Said the Dead

“Perhaps it was never as clear as I imagined; perhaps we are each capable of choosing a different direction, depending on the road on which we find ourselves. Perhaps the kaleidoscopic versions of ourselves that inhabit our days and nights are capable, in fact, of anything.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“In rocking her, maybe I was rocking my own old aching self. Maybe there was some equivalence embedded in that moment, some weird reciprocity. In whispering to a stranger that everything would be OK, maybe I was casting a spell over all of us in our sorrow and pain,...”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“Instead, I'll think of new words, and then I'll follow them.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“Perhaps the compulsion to lay a woman’s life before me and slowly explore each layer started in the dissection room; so many of our most steadfast patterns are begun in those years between childhood and adulthood.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“I find myself thinking of the imperceptible beat in which a word exists, between the articulation and the hearing.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“Never in this quest have I found a simple answer; every lead is always a prelude to more questions.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“She read and read, because she had woken these voices, and to stop reading them would silence them. But even if she was to stop reading, they might keep speaking in her dreams, in the supermarket aisle, in traffic, in the swimming pool, in the library or the post office queue. The only way to let them rest would be to find a way towards an ending. If all she had to lead them there were casebooks, well then, she'd have to keep reading.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Said the Dead

“In choosing to carry a pregnancy, a woman gives of her body with a selflessness so ordinary that it goes unnoticed, even by herself. Her body becomes bound to altruism as instinctively as to hunger. If she cannot consume sufficient calcium, for example, that mineral will rise up from deep within her bones and donate itself to her infant on her behalf, leaving her own system in deficiency. Sometimes a female body serves another by effecting a theft upon itself.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“In my anger, I begin to sense some project that might answer the nurse's query. Perhaps I'd always known what it was all for. Perhaps I'd stumbled upon my true work. Perhaps the years I'd spent sifting the scattered pieces of this jigsaw were not in vain; perhaps they were a preparation. Perhaps I could honour Eibhlín Dubh's life by building a truer image of her days, gathering every fact we hold to create a kaleidoscope, a spill of distinct moments, fractured but vivid. Once this thought comes to me, my heart grows quick. I could donate my days to finding hers, I tell myself, I could do that, and I will.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“The past never ends. Or, worse, the past tells us how it ends. Over, it says, over and over again.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“All the while, I keep one ye on Eibhlín Dubh and one on my daughter in her car seat. She grows in that rear-view mirror. Soon, her eyes are open as I turn towards home. Soon, her gurgles can almost be translated into words. Soon, she is tugging at the straps in which I have bound her. Soon, she is smiling back at me. This is how years pass in that mirror: soon, too soon.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“As I clean, my labour makes of itself an invisibility. If each day is a cluttered page, then I spend my hours scrubbing its letters. In this, my work is a deletion of a presence.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“All our omens hold the mystery of some grave human consequence, now forgotten, leaving only the gleaming symbol in its aftermath. In attempting to comprehend a turn of ill-fortune, we may search for an omen as prelude, for to find such a sign imposes meaning on the chaotic. In seeking an omen, we frequently seek a bird.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“How mysterious, our instincts, those sudden engines that roar up to steer us towards new ends.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“The scratch of nib to paper, the liquid birth and loop of the letters, each connected to the next, word following word, and all the small spaces that exist between them.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“A convex seer, this rear-view mirror lets me peer into the landscape unwinding behind me, but it cannot show what is ahead, nor how I should turn next.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“Sometimes a female body serves another by effecting a theft upon itself.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“In choosing to carry a pregnancy, a woman gives of her body with a selflessness so ordinary that it goes unnoticed, even by herself. Her body becomes bound to altruism as instinctively as to hunger. If cannot consume sufficient calcium, for example, that mineral will rise up from deep with her bones and donate itself to her infanct on her behalf, leaving her own system in deficiency. Sometimes a female body serves another by effecting a theft upon herself.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa

“In the mirror that holds both of us, my dark hair shadows her fair, and there, I observe her reflected scowl at her mother: a real little girl.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat