Emma’s Reviews > Small Things Like These > Status Update

“The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been- which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life.”

“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 brand enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”

“ you don’t mind bringing the foreigners in.’
Hasn’t everyone to be born somewhere,’ Furlong said. ‘Sure wasn’t Jesus was born in Bethlehem.’

“ and wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come”

“ 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.