The past is an obdurate stranger that puts as many marks on us as we attempt to impose on it.

Children are knives, my mother once said. They don’t mean to, but they cut. And yet we cling to them, don’t we, we clasp them until the blood flows.

Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

Divination is a means of telling ourselves what we already know.

Nat Parson says it's the devil's mark." "Nat Parson's a gobshite." Maddy was torn between a natural feeling of sacrilege and a deep admiration of anyone who dared call a parson 'gobshite.

If you want something you can have it, but you have to do some work. It's the ethic my mother brought me up with.

The wind always brings us back to the same wall