Lisa McInerney Quotes

You told me half a story. Why won't you tell me the rest of it?
Coz you're dangerous enough with half a story, aren't you?

Here's my soul, why don't you shit on it?

There were people dying, too. That's the way of the city: one new man to take the place of another, bleeding out on a polished kitchen floor.

She's on her knees for a higher power. The Church craves power above all things, power above all of the living. The Church has an ideal and it'll raze all in its way to achieve it. The Church needs its blind devout. Your mother my mother, the people in there plumping Father Fiddler's ego, they're all for it. They've been given a class and they're clutching it. The Church creates its sinners so it has something to save. Your mother's a Magdalene for her Christ

She had a face like a slapped arse and an arse like a bag of Doritos

You either need to accept the past as the building blocks that brought you right up to today, or you need to be a better liar.

That's the motive. Saving my soul. And let them think they're saving my soul, because in doing that they're saving me from being abused by bastards who think they have a right to rape me.

It's a funny thing that the ritual is more powerful than the killing. What's tied to the earth is less important than what's tied to the heavens. You're crosser about my language in the confessional than you are about the fact that I killed a man.

Times were tough and the people were harsh and the clergy were cruel-cruel, and you know it! The most natural thing in the world is giving birth; you built your whole religion around it. And yet you poured pitch onto girls like me and sold us into slavery and took our humanity away from us twice, a third time, as often as you could. I was lucky, Father. I was only sent away. A decade earlier and where would I have been? I might have died in your asylums, me with the smart mouth. I killed one man but you would have killed me in the name of your god, wouldn't you? How many did you kill? How many lives did you destroy with your morality and your Seal of Confession and your lies? Now. For the absolution. Once God knows you're sorry he lets you off the hook, isn't that right?

Me? Oh, Father. I know I'm sorry. What about you? Bless me Ireland for I have sinned. Go on, boy. No wonder you say infinitely God is brimming with the clemency, for how else would any of you bastards sleep at night?

His being too enveloped in opaque promise, choking the faculty with it. Eyes streaming and throats constricted with the noxious concentrate of Cork's great post-millennial of hope. Oh God, that was it. Ryan was all tied up in nasty knots of his own smothering competence.