Marta

“Well, he need be nobody’s Prior anymore. His bonds are broken. No more obligation to teach, guide, direct, and chasten. No human babble to clog up his ears. Artt has this whole island to himself and it’s his alone. The steep land will be his pristine page and he’ll write on it with every step, every prayer, every breath. A bastion of faith, a sentry post where he will man the outer frontier of Christendom: oh, such a place it’ll be now! No one and nothing to bar his way to heaven.”
― Emma Donoghue, Haven

“Life is the weightiest of gifts, and there’s no giving it back till the end.”
― Emma Donoghue, Haven

“Mummer would tell us these tales over the dinner table without a flicker of doubt that God’s hand was at work in the world, as it had been in the time of the saints and martyrs, the violent deaths of whom were regularly inflicted upon us as exempla of not only the unconditional oath we had to make to the service of the Lord, but of the necessity of suffering. The worse the torment, the more God was able to make Himself known, Mummer said, invoking the same branch of esoteric mathematics Father Wilfred used in his sermons to explain why the world was full of war and murder – a formula by which cruelty could be shown to be inversely proportionate to mercy. The more inhumane the misery we could inflict upon one another, the more compassionate God seemed as a counterpoint to us. It was through pain that we would know how far we still had to go to be perfect in His eyes. And so, unless one suffered, Father Wilfred was wont to remind us, one could not be a true Christian.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“He’s altered, he knows; he’s brewing an infection of the spirit. These days, when he goes poking around the Plateau in search of anything remotely edible — the last of the bitter spoonwort, campion, dock, stonecrop, spurrey, tree mallow, even flakes of orange lichen, in hopes their colour might carry some vigour — in the back of his mind, Cormac is picking a fight. As he and the Prior keep adding to the walls of the chapel — almost roof-height now — his fury rises too.”
― Emma Donoghue, Haven