I stayed up last night finishing The Secret Scripture. For fifteen minutes following I flipped back through parts of the book and thought about the unfairness of it all and cried. Poor Roseanne. What a lonely, heartbreaking life, and she still chose not to be bitter. What a beautiful person who thought all that was left of herself was a rumour of beauty (268).
If you can't tell, I'm a big fan of this book. It is the best book I've read in a long time. Up there with The History of Love, for me.
It was always going to be him. (144)
I must admit I put my mind only lightly to these matters. At least, I attempted lightness. My head is already stuffed with grief I suppose like a pomegranate with its red seeds. I can only bleed grief, having no room for more...I sat there among them with a roaring head. (165)
That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body. (177)
There was the moment we stood side by side in the church, and I looked down at her face just the second before she said 'I do,' and then heard her say it, and then out of her face flew this extraordinary light, flooding up at me. It was love. You do not expect to see love like that. I did not anyhow. (177)
For a moment I thought I could hear music, a swell of old American jazz, but it was only the bleary wind staggering over the summit. And in the music I heard my name. (189)
The room had a little bit of sideways spring sunlight, that seemed to have crept in through the window-glass with an almost apologetic delicacy. A little square beam of it sat across Roseanne's face. Yes, she is very old. Sunlight as always the most brutal measurer of age, but also, the most faithful painter. (197)
I sat there. I am sitting there still. (202)
Some tunes only rarely find their moment, like some ould Christmas song, or slushy old ballads in the deeps of winter when everyone wants to be melancholy. (206)
There are some sufferings that we seem as a creature to forget, or we would never survive as a creature among all the other creatures. The pain of childbirth is said to be one, but I cannot agree there. And the pain of whatever had happened to me is certainly not one either. Even as a sere old crone in this room I can still remember it. Still feel a shadow of it. It is a pain that removes all other things except itself, so that the young woman lying there in her marriage bed was just all pain, all suffering. (210)
Who can really itemise the cause of our human tears? (212)
Imaginings. A nice sort of word for catastrophe and delusion. (219)
How was it I had managed to live in the world with no one? (260)
I suppose we measure the importance of our days by those few angels we spy among us, and yet aren't like them. (268)
Pure feeling, nothing else. Feeling without thought. Just to get there, to keep going and get there. (291)
Because why would I not reject her, when everyone else had? (293)
Photo from here
The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. (5)
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