Rasmus

“That’s the thing about boys. Maybe just Irish boys. Boys have No Go Areas, they have an entire geography of places you can’t go because if you do they’ll crack open, they’ll fall apart and you won’t be able to put them back together, not ever. Girls know this. We know. Even love can’t reach some places.”
― Niall Williams, History of the Rain

“The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall & Bring Up The Bodies

“We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.”
― Niall Williams, History of the Rain

“God, look at you! Then look back. A thousand centuries of absolute terror, absolute grief. How parents stayed sane to raise their kids when half of them died, damned if I know. Yet with broken hearts, they did. While millions died of flu or the Plague. ‘So here we are in a new time that we can’t see because we stand in the eye of the hurricane, where everything’s calm.”
― Ray Bradbury, Stories Volume 2