Star of the Sea

Star of the Sea  

by Joseph O'Connor  

 

 

 

 “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 far more in common than either realized. 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.” 

“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.” 

“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 center.”

“Truly the angels come among us every day. Our difficulty is so often that in our vanity and worldliness we so utterly fail to recognize 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.”