Jessie Ann Foley Quotes & Sayings

Maggie nodded. She was more than okay. Not only was she no longer sick, she felt as if she'd just awoken from the long, safe torpor of her childhood. The night had blasted her free of that shell, and she had emerged new and raw and ready. She felt the ticket stub folded carefully in her pocket. How many kids in Bray would be able to say they'd stood just feet from Billy Corgan, that they'd been at the Metro for the "Siamese Dream" record release show, that they'd seen Lake Shore Drive on a Sunday morning through the prism of a concert comedown, the runners looking so silly with their skinny legs and their neon shorts, chugging along the footpath with their calorie counters and Gatorade? — Jessie Ann Foley

Everything that ever happens to you only happens once, so you better never stop paying attention. — Jessie Ann Foley

By the time the clock had moved past midnight on Christmas 1993, they finally clicked the last piece into place: Angola, nestled between Zaire and Namibia and bordering the vast lapping Atlantic. Then, having succeeded in putting the world back together, they went to bed. — Jessie Ann Foley

In the month that she had lived at Bray, Maggie had felt pockets of this-this slowing down of time, these reverberations into the past. In America, everything was replaceable; ld stuf was thrown away quickly and entirely to make way for the next thing. But in Ireland, the ruined castles that dotted the landscape, the crumbling stnes walls that crisscrossed long-held family fields, these all provided the sense that the past drifted, but did not disappear. It was all around you, like mist. — Jessie Ann Foley

Bootlegs totally defeat the purpose of going to a show. They take away from the preciousness of the lived experience. It happened. You were there for it. And now it's your responsibility to remember it, not to try and re-create it all the time by listening to some shittily recorded attempt at preservation. — Jessie Ann Foley

That's what living people do. They shatter and rebuild, shatter and rebuild, shatter and rebuild until they are old and worn and stooped from the work of it. — Jessie Ann Foley

Maggie sipped her drink with the cat draped across her lap and the dog curled at her feet. The only sounds in the room were the crackling of the fire and Dan Sean's shallow snores. There were no CD's to play, no radio, no television. There was nothing. She was just sitting there in silence, getting drunk. It occurred to her that a person's first drunken experience shoud be in the basement of a friend's house, in a forest preserve, behind the bleachers of a football field. Certainly not in the company of a sleeping ninety-nine-year-old man. She giggled a little and wondered what Uncle Kevin would make of it. "Hot port?" he would say. "Very impressive, Mags. I would have thought you'd be more of a wine cooler type of girl. — Jessie Ann Foley

It must be very hard to be a mother. All those years of knowing everything about your daughter, of dressing her and bathing her and being intimately acquainted with her every need and want, and then one day you wake up and realize you don't even know what kind of dress to buy her at Clery's. — Jessie Ann Foley

I'm not going!" she screamed, grabbing her mother by the shoulder. But Laura didn't even turn around. She hiccupped, once, and watery vomit splashed onto the floor between her legs. Maggie let go of her mother's shoulder then, her rage replaced not exactly with pity, but with such a tired disgust with her whole pathetic family that she gave up. Kevin never came home at all that night, and the next afternoon, Nanny Ei drove them to O'Hare. — Jessie Ann Foley