Marta

“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

“That silence you heard, when you tried to pray — that’s the sound of God listening.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Our faith stands like an island,’ he proclaims, ‘lashed by a sea of doubt.”
― Emma Donoghue, Haven

“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