Star of the Sea

Love and freedom are such hideous words. So many cruelties have been done in their name.

Everything is in the way the material is composed.

They had no previous connection whatever with Connemara; but they saw connections where others who should have seen them simply looked the other way.

They had far more in common than either realised. One was born Catholic, the other Protestant. One was born Irish, the other British. But neither was the greatest difference between them. One was born rich and the other poor.

That each man is the sum of his choices is nothing less than the truth. And each, perhaps, is also something else.

Any assemblage comprising human beings, any family, any party, any tribe, any nation, will bind itself together not by what it shares but ultimately by what it fears, which is often so much greater. Perhaps it abhors the outsider as camouflage for its own alarms; dreading what it would do to itself were the binding to fall asunder.

It is not a matter of ends justifying means: but of the creation of new means and new ends.

How the prisoner and the immigrant are treated by the government, how the poor are treated and those without influence: this is secretly how the government would like to treat us all.

Politics' the polite word for antediluvian prejudices, the rags put on by enmity and tribal resentment.

It was mankind and not the Almighty that had ordered the universe; only a man could look at an accident and call it a creation with Himself at the centre.

...but as his father used to say when he had a few drinks taken, you couldn't expect bloody miracles when you were talking about God.

Truly the angels are come among us every day. Our difficulty is so often that in our vanity and worldliness we so utterly fail to recognise them for what they are.

We still tell each other that we are lucky to be alive, when our being alive has almost nothing to do with luck, but with geography, pigmentation, and international exchange rates.

Boredom is a bit of a bore, to say the least.