It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime.

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

There are fewer and fewer Jews in Ireland, but we still have one of the most famous Jewish characters in literary history, of course, in Leopold Bloom.

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.