Quotes from Michael Crummey

Michael Winter's fiction is a lot like hearing him talk about his life… harrowing in an after-the-fact hilarious way. Full of wonder and mystery. A hangover you wouldn't miss for the world.

He wasn't a religious man but a vision of what Paradise might be came to him, a windowed room afloat on an endless sea, walls packed floor to ceiling with all the books ever written or dreamed of. It was nearly enough to make giving up the world bearable.

From what I have seen of the world, Reverend, motherhood is a certainty, but fatherhood is a subject of debate.

Through the month of December, the radio was slowly strangled by Christmas Carols

He hated confronting those lost moments, being presented with some detail from his past and having to look on it like a stranger. It made his life feel like a made-up thing. A net full of holes.

He was struck by the sensation she'd made it happen in some way, that his life was simply a story the old woman was making up in her head.

Levi's motives were never quite as obvious. There was an Old Testament ruthlessness about him, Shambler thought, something inscrutably tribal at the root.

Mary Tryphena said, It's the only thing the world gives us, you know. The right to say yes or no to love.

The sparse choir murdered a few hymns

A life was no goddamn thing in the end, he thought. Bits and pieces of make-believe cobbled together to look halfways human, like some stick-and-rag doll meant to scare crows out of the garden. No goddamn thing at all.

If you scald your arse, Sweetland's mother used to say, you got to learn to sit on your blisters. He said, "I got what was coming

If you scald your arse, Sweetland's mother used to say, you got to learn to sit on your blisters. He said, "I got what was coming to me, I expect.

The open spaces are almost too raw to take in — lidless eyes of blackwater flashes, caribou moss sodden and spongy as a lung. It's as if the landscape's insides are all on the surface. Exposed stone cracked by millennia of frost, fractures that weren't properly set leaving a permanent hitch in the country's gait. Even as you walk its naked spine you can feel the island limping away from you. TRANSTRÖMER ON BRIMSTONE HEAD 1.

The open spaces are almost too raw to take in — lidless eyes of blackwater flashes, caribou moss sodden and spongy as a lung. It's as if the landscape's insides are all on the surface. Exposed stone cracked by millennia of frost, fractures that weren't properly set leaving a permanent hitch in the country's gait. Even as you walk its naked spine you can feel the island limping away from you.

It was a riddle to see a person could get what they wanted and regret it, could even regret wanting it in the first place.

The Priddles were Irish twins, the second born ten months after the first, and

A body must bear what can't be helped.

The plateau was dotted with massive granite boulders that Jesse claimed were called erratics, dropped there by retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age.

He'd almost forgotten how much he loved the cigarettes, what a poisonous comfort they were.

Her father used to say The death of a horse is the life of a crow, and Ada had never really taken in the meaning of the phrase. But she knew it in her bones now.

Pleasure and shame. Shame and pleasure. These were the world's currencies. And it paid out both in equal measure.

He was a tree stump of a man, limited in his outlook but rooted and unshakeable in his certainties.

It was confounding to see magic and beauty and mystery leach out of a thing, to think it could be used up like a store of winter supplies.

With a rage he mistook for certainty...