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.

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

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

All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.

it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.

It's not the vote women need, we should be armed.