Don Boselovic

“But if he has nothing else to his name, he has his regrets, and these are not without value to the martyr's self-portrait displayed in his mind's eye.

We come into the world on the top of a scream and the wave of our poor mother's roaring.

She had a smile like a home-made explosive device.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“You knew, you knew the Commandments, had learned them out of the missal-thin pages of the green Catechism, where, in a genius move of utter simplicity God had set the high bar for Christianity by saying Love your neighbor like yourself, and you read that and looked over at your neighbor, Patrick Plunkett picking his nose and pressing the pickings on the underside of your desk, and by virtue of nothing more than carnal reality that bar got that much higher.”
― Niall Williams, This Is Happiness

“The question is too big for him. I will see this often in the years to come, the way he could suddenly pause on a phrase or even just a word, as if in it were a doorway and his mind would enter and leave us momentarily. Back then we thought it was what all fathers did. We thought that fatherhood was this immense weight like a great overcoat and there were all manner of things your father had to be thinking of all the time just to keep the overcoat from crushing him.”
― Niall Williams

“The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return.”
― Marilynne Robinson