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“The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . .”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“...sooner or later you have to decide what you believe." It was a thing I'd always known but until recently had forgotten: that faith is a decision. In its most basic form, it is a choice.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“The human heart: its expansions and contractions its electrics and hydraulics the warm tides that move and fill it. For years Art had studied it from a safe distance from many perspectives...he listened in fascination and revulsion, in envy and pity. He dispensed canned wisdom, a little scripture. He sent them on their way with a prayer.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“It wasn’t her problem to solve; it was Kevin’s. Let God fix him. After repeating the words for months, she finally understood what they meant. Let go and let God.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“I open my heart to her and lay it on the table.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“What can a photograph mean? It seems to me, now, that it’s not so much the image itself as the fact that it was kept. In my own bedroom closet are three large boxes I labeled—late one night, in a dark mood—PLUTONIUM. They are filled with my own keepsakes and very heavy, decades of living distilled down to a few potent sentiments: tenderness, longing, regret.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“Often enough, one of us will make the other laugh so hard and long that asphyxiation seems a real danger. It’s a heady pleasure rare in adulthood, not unlike—I will say it—the shared breathlessness of rousingly successful coitus.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“...that renunciation of human closeness, of our deepest instincts: is it, in the end, simply too much to ask? Good men-sound, healthy men-can't make the sacrifice, or don't want to; has Holy Mother settled for the unsound and unhealthy? Has the Church, ever pragmatic, made do with what is left?”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“But his singing was unconscious and irrepressible - an expression of his native exuberance, the dreamy, buoyant soundtrack running through his head.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“Show me a man of fifty who doesn’t regret the lives he hasn’t lived.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“He spent two weeks in South Shore Hospital in a state of near oblivion; and when he woke, it was as though he’d taken a trip around the world and lost most of his luggage along the way. Heavy bags they were, packed with thirty years of indignities, rages, brawls and indiscretions.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“Driving east into the bright sun, he’d been dogged by a creeping sense of déjà vu, but it wasn’t until Kath called to Aidan—Help Father with the cooler!—that he recognized the scene from his own childhood. How strange, how disorienting, to find himself in the man’s seat, driving, when in his mind he was still the little boy.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“To Mike—to most people who have ever known her—Kath Conlon has disappeared completely. It is an addict’s trick, this vanishing act, this dizzying plunge through a dim portal into a dark and beguiling parallel world.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“It’s true more often than we realize: each new love is built from the wreckage of the loves that came before. In Kath, Mike saw Lisa; in Art’s eyes, she resembled our mother. I can’t look at Mike’s face without seeing Dad’s. Art, to Ma, was the living ghost of Harry Breen. We love those who fit the peculiar voids within us, our hollow wounds. We love to fill the spaces the old loves left behind.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“That night he’d glimpsed, however briefly, a sweetly exalted human happiness he’d only read about, Art who’d spent his whole life reading about apparitions. In those few moments he knew genuine tenderness, given and received. He experienced grace. If it sounds like heresy, I am far past caring: for my brother, making love to Kath was a reflection of divine love, a brief flash of God alive in the world.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“And yet there’s no denying that these events generated a tidal wave of confusion and shame, and neither party was much of a swimmer.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“My heart aches for her. I am, myself, no stranger to this waiting, the charged and terrible uncertainty that follows the surrender to passion—this dangling in limbo, waiting, waiting for a man to call.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“You knew about that?â€� Nearly thirty years later, the memory was still embarrassing. I worried what it said about me. At best it seemed to point to some intrinsic foolishness, a deep-seated eccentricity that lurked within me still.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“He kissed her hungrily, as if for nourishment. Later it would seem to him an act of cannibalism; the law he violated seemed nearly that ancient. But that night he was beyond reason, a man too long starved.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“That the woman was beautiful and dear to him, that he’d told her things he’d never told a living soul: this would have been more than enough even without the dreamlike echo of another moment, equally potent. For it seemed to him, the whole day long, that both reels were rolling at once, his boyhood and manhood, the indelible past and achingly tangible present. The boy he’d been and the man he was;”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“What a relief, that laughter! What a blessed release.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“The events of his childhood had never left him. Instead the memory had grown watery, indistinct, like something he’d dreamed. Abused, molested: these were not terms he used, even to himself.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“The human heart: its expansions and contractions, its electrics and hydraulics, the warm tides that move and fill it.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“Kath woke the next morning in a state of dazed wonder. It is a sensation I have experienced myself, a frank amazement when my cynicism is confounded. When, defying all precedent, the thing I most desire actually appears.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“All these explanations, and more, had been offered to Arthur. He could choose from among them whichever he liked, like drawing a card from a deck.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“Watching, I dread my own womanhood, the day when I too will follow along carrying bags of groceries, my mission wherever I go to feed other people who take actual part in life while I am simply the catering staff.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“Abby was an excellent mother, by every measure better than Ma had been. She rationed the boysâ€� TV watching, doled out vitamins, kept track of their dental checkups, wrestled them into their baths. Yet Mike sometimes wondered: did Abby enjoy their children? Wasn’t there more to being a parent than simply doing everything right?”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith