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.

The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.

She was an auxiliary nurse but training to be a true nurse because that was her calling, to serve mankind. She was a Martha. There were Marys and Marthas, but Marys got all the limelight because of being Christ's handmaiden, but Marthas were far more sincere.

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.

I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.

I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.