Clergyman's

What we run here, Brother, is a finishing school for the sons of the Idle Poor.""
""It finishes them all right.
- Bernard MacLaverty

He put his feet up on the mantelpiece and leaned back in the chair. He thought about how things happened to him but he brought nothing about. What he needed was self-discipline. His mother had ruled her own life with a hand of iron. She did everything she should do, getting up at seven and walking a mile to mass every day no matter what the weather; if she wanted one thing badly she did without others; if what she wanted was spiritual she denied her body. In Lent she took black tea and weighed her morsels of food on scales and for six weeks wouldn't let a sweet cross her lips although she loved them. She sent money abroad to her working sisters while at night she sat with a wooden mushroom darning her stockings with a criss-cross brown thread. She worked so her family would not want and Cal had never wanted while she was alive.
He got a sense of a new life, a new start now that he had officially moved into the cottage. He would discipline himself. He felt a surge of his own power to direct his life into whatever path he wanted. There were six cigarettes left in his packet and he lit one and smoked it with a decadent pleasure, knowing it to be his last. The rest he threw into the fire.
- Bernard MacLaverty

On the wall above the desk was an ikon he had bought in Thessaloníki - he afterwards discovered that he had paid too much for it. It had been hanging for some months before he noticed, his attention focused by a moment of rare idleness, that Christ had a woodworm hole in the pupil of his left eye. It was inconspicuous by its position, and rather than detracting from the impact, he felt the ikon was enhanced by the authenticity of this small defect.
- Bernard MacLaverty

The coffee was good and the first sip made him want a cigarette. His hand went to his pocket before he realised it was decades since he'd had a smoke. The desire came out of nowhere. He thought how foolish, how stuck in routine the body becomes. Would the same thing happen if he tried to give up drinking?
- Bernard MacLaverty

Violence is a bit like antibodies. Small doses build up until you can reject and be immune to the most horrific events.
- Bernard MacLaverty

Violence is a bit like antibodies. Small doses build up until you can reject and be immune to the most horrific events.
- Bernard MacLaverty

Stella found herself isolating one particular snowflake - a small one - and watching its progress. Lifting, floating, eddying upwards, sinking among the others. Dithering. Then when it went off her radar she would choose another and watch it and will it to survive for as long as possible.
- Bernard MacLaverty

On the wall above the sink was a board, with tools clipped to it. A hammer, screwdrivers - a pair of pliers, a hacksaw. And other stuff. Each item was outlined carefully in red paint.
""I like your board arrangement,"" said Stella.
""It's to remind me to put things back. If I don't, the empty ghost yells at me. So I put things back.
- Bernard MacLaverty

On the wall above the sink was a board, with tools clipped to it. A hammer, screwdrivers - a pair of pliers, a hacksaw. And other stuff. Each item was outlined carefully in red paint.
""I like your board arrangement,"" said Stella.
""It's to remind me to put things back. If I don't, the empty ghost yells at me. So I put things back.
- Bernard MacLaverty

It's a bad day when the biggest thing you catch is a seagull.
- Bernard MacLaverty