Quotes from Nuala O'Faolain

Though it seemed trivial, now, to describe a place as if what is was, was what I could see of it.

Did anyone ever hear of an intelligent fantasy?

The world is wonderful, she said. All its little things. It is wonderful.

States have no goodness. They suppress these villains here and promote those villains there, with no aim but self-aggrandizement.

What is not challenged from outside is open to corruption from within. -This is the infinite value of a dissenting voice: that where it is not allowed to flourish, an institution- a school or an orphanage or a government or a media consensus....begins to slide toward allowing its worst energies into play.

In any case, I would prefer to read something I don't enjoy than do almost anything else. I like the act of reading in itself. Following the lines of something — not just the story but the rhythm, the tone, the feel of what has accumulated from before and what is beginning to impend — becoming surefooted on the high-wire of the author's intention.

Sean had been one of a group of people who wanted to rescue the Irish language from being a grim thing taught in schools and to reaffirm it in every area of life-in comedy, sex, cursing, drinking, everything. These men started the Brian Merriman School so that, for one week a year, anyone who wanted to could go to Clare to learn and talk and listen and sing and dance, in Irish or English, but anyway in the old Gaelic spirit.

But Ireland isn't just landscape, but history and present society. There was famine and brutality and emptiness in the country. And the damaged underclass I was part of in the afternoon pubs was as much part of Ireland as its beauty.