If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin

I crossed the room, and what you did was to feel my hair over and over again and in different ways, touch it, with the palm of your hand... felt it, strands of hair, with your fingers, touched it as if it were cloth, the way a child touches its favorite surfaces.

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 always want to be in love, always. It's like being a tuning fork.

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.

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

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