We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage - almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often… — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
“The phrase "the violent bear it away" fascinated the 20th century Irish-American storyteller Flannery O'Connor, who used it as the title of one of… — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
“In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths… — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of… — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable? — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
The Irish innovation was to make all confession a completely private affair between penitent and priest - and to make it as repeatable as… — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
“They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to things or… — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
“We followed the rump of a misguiding woman. It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be strayed and… — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
“Cujus regio, ejus religio (Whose region it is, his is the religion).” — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most… — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
(The festival) was awfully impersonal and abstract and there was something really gloomy about it, ... That's when I first started thinking about the… — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
“We will never make it under our own stem. Having made this connection, Augustine falls apart. What he describes at this point in the… — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
The Jews started it all-and by 'it' I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of… — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
The Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent. — Thomas Cahill Copy Share Image
