Marta

“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

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

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

“I used to love stories about babies coming out of plants, or turning into humans from animal form. I pored over the Greek myths – how a baby could be born from a ray of light, or a thunderbolt, or from a swan. I felt an affinity with these babies, these other kinds of humans – a dangerous affinity, I should add, for in fact I was simply a very normal human being.”
― Jessie Burton, The Confession