What we forgot as children is that our parents are children, also. The child in them has not been satisfied or met or loved, often.

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

what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.

We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.

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.

Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read.

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.