"Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."

"Maybe niceness is the wrong metric, I said. Of course it's really about power, Bobbi agreed. But it's harder to work out who has the power, so instead we rely on 'niceness' as a kind of stand-in."

"The music of birds. I guess everything comes from that, the dances of simple country folk, the old songs that both cure and trouble the hearts of listeners."

"There comes a time when you just have to live among your ghosts. You keep the conversation going. Elsewise the broad field of the future opens out as nothing but a vast emptiness."

"I want you to believe...to believe in things that you cannot."

"Under reason you can't work you've written: "I'm tired of acting normal."

"People move around so much in the world, things get lost."

"An that's what the Risin' was about—I think, anyway. The right to be different. The things tha' make us Irish. The little things."

"The school isn't the students , or the teachers, or even the school itself: it's a syste, and the system is sheeding its hostages; its deadweight; that non-negotiable lump that grows inside it like cancer, because there is something unaccepatable in the hostage..."

"When I came back to Dublin, I was court martialed in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence."

"...without good manners, human society would be intolerable and impossible"

"We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?"

"The way to see the bird you want to see, is to stop looking for it, we all know this. You have to undo your gaze, let the bird happen without you."

"Take what you want and pay for it, says God. You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and you will have to pay it."

"This wrong doubtful body should not have been mine. Mine was. Not this. Was perfect. Once. Drag the. I will and sit and drown if the. Come water. Over land. Swallow up. Swallow me down. Drag me in the gullys. In the pipes please and the drains."

"In future, she hoped, fewer people would call. In future, once the boys went to bed, she might have the house to herself more often. She would learn how to spend these hours. In the peace of these winter evenings, she would work out how she was going to live."