All stories are, in some form, prayers.

— Brian Doyle

...awkward passion is so often so very much more admirable than mere achievement.

— Brian Doyle

Brian Doyle about the Irish custom of “taking to the bed.” He says “In Irish culture, taking to the bed with a gray heart is not considered especially odd. People did and do it for understandable reasons—ill health, or the black dog, or, most horrifyingly, to die during An Aorta For, the great hunger, when whole families took to their beds to slowly starve… And in our time: I know a woman who took to her bed for a week after September eleventh, and people who have taken to their beds for days on end to recover from shattered love affairs, the death of a child, a physical injury that heals far faster than the psychic wound gaping under it. I’ve done it myself twice, once as a youth and once as a man, to think through a troubled time in my marriage. Something about the rect angularity of the bed, perhaps, or salinity, or silence, or timelessness; for when you are in bed but not asleep there is no time, as lovers and insomniacs know. Yet, anxious, heartsick, we take to the bed, saddled by despair and dissonance and disease, riddled by mindedness and madness, rattled by malaise and misadventure, and in the ancient culture of my forbears this was not so unusual…. For from the bed we came and to it, we shall return, and our nightly voyages there are nutritious and restorative, and we have taken to our beds for a thousand other reasons, loved and argued and eater and seethed there, and sang and sobbed and suckled, and burned with fevers and visions and lust, and huddled and howled and curled and prayed. As children, we all, every one of us, pretended the bed was a boat; so now, when we are so patently and persistently and daily at sea, why not seek a ship? p. 119-20Brian Doyle in The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart, p. 90-91

— Brian Doyle

But if we do not dream, then I think perhaps we are misusing our heads. They are not on our shoulders only to be farms for hair.

— Brian Doyle

But simple as the Sign of the Cross is, it carries a brave weight: it names the Trinity, celebrates the Creator, and brings home all the power of faith to the brush of fingers on skin and bone and belly. So do we, sometimes well and sometimes ill, labor to bring home our belief in God's love to the stuff of our daily lives, the skin and bone of this world — and the Sign of the Cross helps us to remember that we have a Companion on the road.

— Brian Doyle

But we [writers] are crucial. That is what I hope you have learned. We listen for and collect and share stories. Without stories there is no nation and no religion and no culture. Without stories of bone and substance and comedy there is only a river of lies, and sweet and delicious ones they are, too. We are the gatherers, the shepherds, the farmers of stories. We wander widely and look for them and gather them and harvest them and share them as food. It is a craft as necessary and nutritious as any other, and if you are going to be good at it, you must double your humility and triple your curiosity and quadruple your ability to listen.

— Brian Doyle

Did I ever tell you about ASIN? She is the wild woman of the woods. It's an old story of the People. My mom used to tell me about ASIN. ASIN couldn't bear being married or having children or having friends. She always wanted to run wild. She ran wild through the woods. If you saw her running you had to run to water as fast as you could and drink or her restlessness would come into you like a thirst that could never be quenched. She was happy and unhappy. She had wild long hair, and she was very tall, and she ran like the wind. When you saw dune grass rippling in a line she was running through it. When the wind changed direction suddenly that was ASIN. She was never satisfied or content, and so she ran and ran and ran. She would grab men who were fishing alone and make love to them and then throw them down on the ground and run away weeping. Furthermore, she would grab children who wandered too far alone in the woods, but she would return them to the same spot after three days and run away again. Furthermore, she would listen to women talking by the fire or working in the village or gathering berries but if they invited her to join them she ran away. You could hear her crying sometimes when the sun went down. She wanted something, but she never knew what it was so she had nothing. She was as free as anyone ever could be and she was trapped. When I was young I wanted to be ASIN. Many times I wanted to be ASIN. So do you, Nora. I know. It's okay. It's alright. My sweet love. Poor ASIN. Sometimes I think to be ASIN would be the saddest thing in the world. Poor thing.

— Brian Doyle

Edward believes that all religions are cousins at heart and begin in the right spirit, but then they are corrupted by the desire for power.

— Brian Doyle

Everyone thinks that the old days were better, or that they were harder, and the modern times are chaotic and complex, or easier all around, but I think people's hearts have always been the same, happy and sad, and that hasn't changed at all. It's just the shapes of lives that change, not the lives themselves.

— Brian Doyle

For a moment this day, for many moments this May, let us gape in awe at the strength of women, and look upon their sinewy courage with respect and humility, as the Lord looked on His Mother, and still does. Like Him, we are of women born, and to women must pay our first respect, and owe our first love, for they are as strong as the very ribs of the earth.

— Brian Doyle