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

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.

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.

Kindness. The most unkind thing of all.

Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth.

Life, after all, was a secret with the self. The more one gave out, the less there remained for the center--that center which she coveted for herself and recognized instantly in others. Fruits had it, the very heart of, say, a cherry, where the true worth and flavor lay. Some of course were flawed or hollow in there. Many, in fact.

jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.