Best 9 quotes of Patricia Monaghan on MyQuotes

I did not have to believe. I only had to wonder.

I'm a bit uncomfortable, truth be told, with being seen as an expert, because there is always so much more to learn. I see myself as a perpetual student of the goddess.

It is so easy to close down to risk, to protect ourselves against change and growth. But no baby bird emerges without first destroying the perfect egg sheltering it. We must risk being raw and fresh and awkward. For without such openness, life will not penetrate us anew. Unless we are open, we will not be filled.

Nothing grows well without space and air.

The gift of creating new life needs to be, once again, welcomed and honoured as one of the most mysterious of human powers. And women need to be confirmed in their decisions to use this power however and whenever they see fit.

The goddess has never been lost. It is just that some of us have forgotten how to find her.

Grief is a strange journey. Each time we embark upon it, it is as though we have never taken its roads before. No, I have that wrong: each grief brings us through a familiar landscape carved into unrecognizable contours. For we do not only lose another person; we lose the person we were with the one we lost.

Ireland is still what novelist Edna O'Brien calls a "pagan place." But that paganism does not conflict with a devout Catholicism that embraces and absorbs it, in a way that can seem mysterious, even heretical, elsewhere. In Ireland, Christianity arrived without lions and gladiators, survived without autos-da-fe and Inquisitions. The old ways were seamlessly bonded to the new, so that ancient rituals continued, ancient divinities became saints, ancient holy sites were maintained just as they had been for generations and generations.

The American definition of paganism is especially suspect among the Irish, too, when it seems to imply adherence to some British cult. The fact that most of the self-proclaimed "witches" in Ireland are English does not escape comment, and notice is also given to the number of American tourists who traipse through on pilgrimages to these minor celebrities and make no inquires about local beliefs.