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1 " If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be. ” — Joseph Campbell "
― Claire Fullerton , A Portal in Time
2 " Together, we were a girl complete. Separately, we were inchoate and in need of each other, like solitary pieces of a clock that were useless until assembled, but once assembled, kept perfect time. "
― Claire Fullerton , Little Tea
3 " Nostalgia has selective memory; it softens the heart and strips the details to leave you with what should have been instead of what was. "
4 " I know now, since I'm well into my adulthood, that there's a side to the unions made in high school that has perpetual resonance, a side that remains in arrested development that will never let you forget who you essentially are. "
5 " What is the fire of inspiration that resides within, if not something to follow along a path? "
― Claire Fullerton , Mourning Dove
6 " Because the thing about being a Southern girl is they let you run loose until the time comes to shape you. "
7 " The Memphis Finley and I landed in was my mother’s Memphis. It was magnolia-lined and manicured, black-tailed and bow-tied. It glittered in illusory gold and tinkled in sing-song voices. It was cloistered, segregated, and well-appointed, the kind of place where everyone monogrammed their initials on everything from hand towels to silver because nothing mattered more than one’s family and to whom they were connected by lineage that traced through the fertile fields of the Mississippi Delta. "
8 " There is a feel about Galway you can wear around your shoulders like a cloak. It hangs in the air with its dampness; it walks the cobblestone streets and stands in the doorways of its gray stone buildings. It blows in with the mist from the Atlantic and lingers incessantly at every corner. I have never been able to walk the streets of Galway without feeling some unnamed presence accompanying me. "
― Claire Fullerton
9 " Irish men are afraid of being in love because they lose control. The women in this country trap them with babies at an early age, and then it is all over for them. They think it is better not to love. They think there is no risk if they push the love away. "
― Claire Fullerton , Dancing to an Irish Reel
10 " There’s an energy that hangs between strangers even in a crowd. "
11 " There's a period of uncertainty that comes into play upon meeting someone who interests you. It must be inherent in attraction, for I’ve never met anybody who hasn’t experienced it, it’s just a question of to what degree they’re going to admit it. "
12 " From my American vantage point, there seemed to be a subtle dance the Irish employ around any charged topic even when they’re trying to say something specific. It’s as if the higher the stakes, the vaguer they become. "
13 " I found it interesting that fate had provided the chance encounter. It seemed to me that if we, in our human frailty, didn’t have the courage to take care of business, then the powers that be intervened seemingly by chance. "
14 " Well, Ireland is an old culture,” he explained, “and old cultures are subtle cultures. We’re like most of Europe that way. There is a great respect for language that I don’t think you have in America. We’re colorful in our language, all right. You know, I was a language teacher at the boy’s school across the road for many years. "
15 " When I first met my wife, who is no longer with us; God bless her and a fine one she, I didn’t have the words to tell her anything, no, nothing at all,” he shook his head with a nostalgic smile. “We’re not one for spilling the soul around here, and you’d be best not looking for it,” he said. "
16 " The mind registers trauma in step-by-step increments, lest you become overwhelmed. It is the unadulterated meaning of saving grace, a mechanism within each of us that is far too intelligent to make use of the basic instincts of fight or flight, because it is beyond it. The mind freezes in the critical moment, and waits until you are strong enough to take the next step. "
17 " Your heart breaks only once in a lifetime. Every offense in its wake is only a variation of the original laceration. Only once can you say you have no frame of reference. Only once are you knocked to your knees by an intractable powerlessness, where the only option is surrender in listless defeat. Subsequent infractions are damaging in their own right, but they’re only a visitation of the original wound, which remains half-healed forever, with scar tissue that defines you for the rest of your life. "
18 " It was cloistered, segregated, and well-appointed, the kind of place where everyone monogrammed their initials on everything from hand towels to silver because nothing mattered more than one’s family and to whom they were connected by lineage that traced through the fertile fields of the Mississippi Delta. "
19 " occupying the same stream. They were distinct opposites going through the motions of co-creating a life, but the gossamer veneer of their marriage started to shred the day my father impulsively quit his job as vice president of a bank in Minneapolis. One hundred thousand dollars from a deceased aunt I’d never heard of must have seemed like a lifetime cushion to my father, but when he shared the news with my mother, Finley and I heard the ballistic reverberation in every room of the house. "
