How to Build a Boat

And you have been having difficulty in seeing the full picture but here's the thing, kiddo, there's no full picture, the picture is always filling, filling, let it, don't try to order it or organise, listen to it, watch it fill.

The College was everything Tess Mahon despised about education; closest to the church, farthest from god.

He was unsure that a woman who was so resilient could even allow herself to be loved.

To some, the world is filled with threats. To others, opportunities.

his desire to find the interconnection in every random set of occurrences, made her realise how much she was missing out on—in an effort to keep peace, or to just avoid drama. She was beginning to realise that by avoiding drama she was headed for an almighty crash. And how she had switched off entirely from looking for any beauty in the world.

He intends / wants to prove that the probability of connected cycles between all of his life’s events, and the energy that he obsesses with (and M Theory to Perpetual Motion Machines and Infinity) means that there is an above average probability that there exists a complex web of interconnectedness of everyone who had ever loved him, with everyone that would love him, and he is the link

Path to hell paved with polite fucking nonsense, O’Toole, Tadhg said as O’Toole walked out.

But no one had any idea about anyone else in that school, about their lives, or trauma, their business, or about the weight they carried.

...[W]hile language came readily to Tess when dealing with herself alone, having one-way conversations over all of her choices on her long walks in the woods, or on her way to school, now she no longer tabled these discussions with her husband.

That's dedication and if life's taught me anything, we go to what we love, eventually - we mightn't find it straight away, but we get there.

How can I miss someone I have never met? Jamie said. Grief was profoundly different for both humans. One felt an intense anger he had never recovered from, the other knew something was missing, a vacuum to where a mother should fit, and he had a fixed determination to fill it.

like breathing it is as simple or complex as the day is on your lungs.

Eoin has taken off his shoes and there’s something vulnerable and sad for Jamie watching his dad in jeans pulled over his knees, and the whiteness of his skin.

think how fragile everything seems now, that I know nothing of what will become of me, and if I’m even on the right tracks at all to become a man.

this is the laughing that turns,