Edward Costelloe

“To watch these things issuing from the otherwise mute pastoral morning is a man at the barn door. He is small, unclean, unshaven. He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps. Wasps pass through the laddered light from the barnslats in a succession of strobic moments, gold and trembling between black and black, like fireflies in the serried upper gloom.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

“What is a country but a life sentence?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“And Patroclus,
Shaking the voice out of his body, says:
‘Big mouth.
Remember it took three of you to kill me.
A god, a boy, and, last and least, a prince.
I can hear Death pronounce my name, and yet
Somehow it sounds like Hector.
And as I close my eyes I see Achilles’ face
With Death’s voice coming out of it.’

Saying these things Patroclus died.
And as his soul went through the sand
Hector withdrew his spear and said:
‘Perhaps.”
― Christopher Logue, War Music: An Account of Homer's Iliad

“Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies