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.

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.

...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.

The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.

Women get the short shrift in history. It's been largely written and dictated by men, or at least men believe that we own it, and women have really been in those quieter moments at the edge of history. But, really, they're the ones who are turning the cogs and the wheels and allowing things like the peace process to happen.

I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.

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.