SeaShore’s Reviews > Walking with Ghosts > Status Update

The pupils ganged up on the brother and ambushed him They fled thrilled by their violence like Tom Barry's guerillas in the Civil War he (the Brother) taught them in class.
"Years later, I met him walking in the street, his eyes glued to the pavement as if looking for somethin he'd lost.... He had a tremor when he shook my hand. Both of us with scars; his above the eyebrow, mine invisible."

The other brother beat the pupils with his cane and Byrne recalls pressing his fist into his eye to dull the pain of the beating then a cloud of purple ringed with gold would appear, then darkness. He bit his nails and the skin around them down to 'bloody stumps' Very tragic!!... Hands felt like on fire for a humiliated eternity. .. His imaginings from stories like "The Wind In the Willow" saved him.

In this memoir, Byrne reminisces on his childhood through personal stories For example at the Christian Brothers' school for older boys, where he was sent at age ten. The good and bad part iinclude the history you learn of the old castle, where Oliver Cromwell kept horses in 1649. He massacred the Irish people; what the Irish thought of the English; his favorite teacher, Brothe Brennigan and the other Brother.

It was Winter, New York. I was an exile emigrant and immigrant belonging everywhere and nowhere at all. Home is where the heart is but the heart itself had no home.

"I have never loved concrete as I love a tree or reeds by a river flamed by an evening sun, or the first stars of the evening; the bleat of a lamb in a distant field or the small spitter of rain on a windowpane. " Gabriel Byrne

Excellent book with good motivational stories - he overcame being beaten, depression and sexual abuse.

I like the level of anonymity I have now. When I was doing In Treatment (2008), it became a nightmare - much more than it had been before that. You have to be very careful with television. I love working but I don't want that kind of attention again. -Gabriel Byrne

I would like to break out of this "dark, brooding" image, cause I'm actually not like that at all. In Ireland, brooding is a term we use for hens. A brooding hen is supposed to lay eggs. Every time somebody says "He's dark and brooding" I think: "He's about to lay an egg". Gabriel Byrne
This author/actor's name was so unfamiliar to me. Yet, I watched The Usual Suspects, and Enemy of the State. Amazing character.