Later as the day cools and they have gone in, the cry of the corncrake will carry across those same fields and over the lake to the blue-hazed mountain, such a lonely evening sound to it, like the lonely evening sound of the mothers, saying it is not our fault that we weep so, it is nature's fault that makes us first full, then empty.

I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time.

Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.

IT WAS TESS who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We'd been school friends. We'd picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn.

Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.

Movie people are possessed by demons, but a very low form of demons.

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.