My Father's House

Harmony is an everyday, achievable miracle. Imagine having been the first person to think of it, to attempt it with another. I shall sing this. You sing that. Something greater than I or you will result.

have come to see that neutrality is the most extremist stance of all; without it, no tyranny can flourish.

I saw all political systems as more or less the same, forms of foolishness, the prattling of apes, designed to keep the lesser chimps down.

I have come to see that neutrality is the most extremist stance of all; without it, no tyranny can flourish.

Life schools you the way no catechism will.

A religiously minded kid will often be good at lying awake all night because you need an imagination if you're going to believe.

painful difficulty about happiness is that we so rarely notice its arrival.

A painful difficulty about happiness is that we so rarely notice its arrival.

England and her owners toiled hard at being hated. In Ireland

but in truth I am rather fond of dozing off on a well-upholstered old couch in firelight, a ghost story or a book of poems I don’t understand by my side and a small whisky and water on the ottoman. A certain amount of sleeplessness seems to suit me.

Appetite? Man dear, you’d want to have seen them. They’d ate the leg off the lamb of God.

But you want to be good and careful when you’re dealing with the stupid. Stupidity has cunning, otherwise it would have disappeared a long time ago. Stupidity is a shark. It outlasts.

There are some ideas so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them.

My view of the universe was, as it remains, that there is nothing to hope for and nothing to fear; to live just once is miracle enough.

But as every guilty-hearted author will know, there are afternoons when you are supposed to be writing when all you can face is a cup of tea and a walk. A book rather gets its hands around your throat and shakes you until your fillings fall out. Some writers are skilled with words, but all of us are skilled with procrastination.

We can never know the miracle that is hiding in the everyday. Sometimes, it is a matter of looking.

hope, if it is ever encountered, is in the small things of the everyday, not an announcement from on high. In the aroma of cooking, a phrase from Vivaldi. A handclasp. A conversation.

There is no intoxicant quite as numbing as perfect despair.

…he once signed an antiquarian book of Artusi’s recipes, a birthday gift to me, with a beloved quotation he translated from Wilde, “Dopo una buona cena si può perdonare chiunque, persino I propri parenti” – after a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations” pg341

Protestant tombstones are so touching, full of tenderness and anecdote, their euphemisms for death so hopeful. My son who fell asleep. Returned to the Light. His beloved wife departed to that further shore. Gone away to glory. Called home. Pg340

More die coming down Everest than perish on the way up. A fact known by soldiers and bank robbers everywhere. Every raid needs its getaway driver. From the outset it had been agreed that Jo Landini would rendezvous with the mission-runner two kilometres from home and that a motorcycle was the best option or at any ratethe least-bad. One would never plan a Rendimento without plotting with fanatical assiduousness the safest way back to base. That was at Derry’s insistence, fruit of his Sandhurst training. A missionrunner can get sloppy at the very end of the run; he’s exhausted, falsely elated; it’s the most dangerous few minutes. He needs help getting over the line. Pg320

Dear Mam and Dad, Just a note from snowbound Rome. I said Mass for you this morning, the feast of St. Stephen. In case I never told you: No one ever had more loving parents. Thank you for my life. Happy 1944. Your Hugh. Pg317

This was the first time he realised that a book can be read in more than one way, is often about a secret at which the title does not even hint. A story was a bottle, a way of storing something valuable; what was printed on the label was only part of the preciousness, if that. Pg284

He’s stubborn, the Padre. Wouldn’t never see reason, droving us all flaming scats. Typical bloody Paddy. World of his own. Ask Pat to do the sensible, obvious thing? May as well dig a hole in the sea. Pg242

On the quay, facing into the slab of a growing storm, he tosses a Lucky Strike packet stuffed with hundred-dollar bills into a dustbin daubed with a treble clef – first drop-off accomplished, almost on time – as he passes the padlocked gates of an Augustinian chapterhouse where seven escaped paratroopers have been hiding out for a month. Across the street, over the bakery, two Iowan rear-gunners and a B-26 Marauder pilot from New Orleans whose ulcerated wisdom tooth is giving him agony. Something will need to be done for him. Not tonight. In the wine cellar beneath a trattoria on Via Geminiani three; in the stockloft above a shop selling priestly vestments and fine chalices, nine; behind a false partition in an art gallery on Via Bellini, one, in the coal bunker of a tobacconists, two… Pg 226

One of his sayings rather struck me as worth putting on a poster in the Underground or somewhere. “Think of yourself as dead. Now, return and live your life.

Four metres take him to a junction where the crawlspace enters a downsloping cobbled passageway echoing of dripping water. In a cleft in the brickwork, his electric torch. He switches it on – the battery is weakening – and continues into the murk. Descending into the shaft by the iron ladder on its wall, he enters a cellar system that has not seen light in seven hundred years. Long ago, Vatican servants lived here among the pantries and wine vaults, the ice rooms, vats and ship-sized casks; there is no plan of this warren, at least none he has ever seen. Not even the fleets of Roman workmen who came in to shore it up following a collapse thirty years ago were able to count these passageways. Pg192

Well, he’s looked at me for a while. I can hear his brain turning. Because it’s a crossroads, when you think. A moment like that. You’ll remember it the rest of your life, depending on how you choose. There’s a swamp between you and the right thing; how far out are you going to wade? It matters, what you did. Always will. “Fetch another cup, would you, John?” “We expecting a guest, sir?” “I should like you to have a cup of this ghastly brew with me, John. Be seated.” “What are we going to talk about?” “Nothing.” Pg136