A cat and a Bible, and nobody needs to be lonely.

... if one can remember without loving, then couldn't one love without remembering?

When a great burden is lifted, the relief is not always felt at once. The galled places still ache.

Women are like dogs really. They love like dogs, a little insistently. And they like to fetch and carry and come back wistfully after hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a basket.

[On the Irish:] Strange race ... Don't know what they want, but want it like the devil.

Men play harder than they work; women work harder than they play.

The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.