The end of art is peace.

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.