Michaela Okland

“It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“He thought of Mrs Wilson, of her daily kindnesses, of how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things which, when added up, amounted to a life. Had it not been for her, his mother might very well have wound up in that place. In an earlier time, it could have been his own mother he was saving – if saving was what this could be called. And only God knew what would have happened to him, where he might have ended up.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“He began to understand violence as the result of a belief system men all seemed to share, which told them they were the authority in their lives, that they were to be respected, obeyed. Top of the human hierarchy. It was a belief system that not only distanced them from people around them, but also limited their range, kept them boxed in by their own narrow ideas of what men could be and how men could behave.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These