Fran Mulhern

“Women don’t realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones. Our pulse is set to theirs, and as always on a weekend afternoon we were waiting for my mother to start us ticking away on the evening. And”
― Louise Erdrich, The Round House

“Indians look very puzzled, surprised and offended to be shot but they go to the wall with noble mien I must allow. You can’t have nothing good in war without you punishing the guilty, the sergeant says with a savage air and no one says nothing against that. John Cole whispers to me that most times that sergeant he just wrong but just now and then he’s right and he’s right this time. I guess I’m thinking this is true. We get drunk then and the sergeant is clutching his belly all evening and then everything is blotted out till you awake in the bright early morning needing a piss and then it all floods back into your brain what happened and it makes your heart yelp like a dog.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End: AN IRISH TIMES BEST IRISH BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY

“THERE’S OLD SORROW in your blood like second nature and new sorrow that maddens the halls of sense. Causes”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End: AN IRISH TIMES BEST IRISH BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY

“We may be black-hearted men when our turn comes but there is a seam in men called justice that nothing burns off complete. Caught-His-Horse-First”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End: AN IRISH TIMES BEST IRISH BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY