Since their mother's death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been raised by their loving, possessive, and ambitious father. As the former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle wants to see his sons in politics, a dream the boys have never shared. But when an argument in a blinding New England snowstorm... read more
“Not the heavy, wet flakes that come down like silver dollars and melt a minute later, and not the very dry tiny snow that blows around and never really settles on anything. This was a hard, steady fall of medium-sized flake that meant business. To tilt your head back and look straight up into a streetlight was to have some comprehension of infinity.”
“Teddy on the other hand was more like a cloud. The slightest breath of wind could send him to the hall closet to hunt up a tennis racquet he hadn’t seen in years, or out to the mailbox on the corner to see if the time for the pickup had changed even though he had nothing to mail.”
“He believed in a carefully ordered universe: action and reaction. But now he could no longer picture a God who kept track of such minutiae or would think to punish anyone for it. Over the course of his lifetime, God and Father Sullivan had changd together”
““Catholicsm is an obsessive compulsive faith”, the doctor said to Doyle...”
It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for Him.Highlighted by 95 Kindle customers
How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy.Highlighted by 77 Kindle customers
It seemed from this moment of repose that God may well have been life itself.Highlighted by 72 Kindle customers
“‘The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling,’” Doyle said from memory. “‘ Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.’”Highlighted by 69 Kindle customers
Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.Highlighted by 62 Kindle customers
The present life was only a matter of how things had stacked together in the past,Highlighted by 47 Kindle customers
This business of coming back to take your little part in the play you would never again be the star of was simply more than anyone should have to bear.Highlighted by 37 Kindle customers
Somewhere along the line Teddy’s love for his mother had become his love for Father Sullivan, and his love for Father Sullivan became his love for God. The three of them were bound into an inextricable knot: the living and the dead and the life everlasting. Each one led him to the other, and any member of the trinity he loved simply increased his love for all three.Highlighted by 34 Kindle customers
That was the first time Tennessee saw just how politics, once you dug through everything that was worthless, could leave you stunned. There were some people who had the ability to tell other people what was worth wanting, could tell them in a way that was so powerful that the people who heard them suddenly had their eyes opened to what had been withheld from them all along.Highlighted by 27 Kindle customers
That was one of the many things Doyle had found so admirable about his wife: her ability to look at their children and see them at every age. She managed to hang on to every bit of love she had ever felt for them, while Doyle could only see the person they were at that exact moment in time.Highlighted by 20 Kindle customers
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