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Had it not been for her, his mother might very well have wound up in that place. In an earlier time, it could have been his own mother he was saving - if saving was what this could be called. And only God knew what would have happened to him, where he might have ended up.

He thought of Mrs Wilson, of her daily kind-nesses, of how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things which, when added up, amounted to a life.

As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

Always, Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people.

‘Is there anything I can do for you, a leanbh?’ he asked. 'All you need do is tell me?’
She looked at the window and took a breath and began to cry, the way those unused to any type of kindness do when it's at first or after a long time again encountered.

Not for the first time, Furlong felt that he was poor company for her, that he seldom made a long night shorter. Did she ever imagine how her life would be if she had married another?

Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls. He was touching forty but didn't feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.

'But what if it was one of ours? Furlong said.
‘This is the very thing I'm saying, she said, rising again. ‘Tis not one of ours?'
‘Isn’t it a good job Mrs Wilson didn't share your ideas?’ Furlong looked at her. ‘Where would my mother have gone? Where would I be now?’

And for a whole day or more, Furlong had gone around feeling a foot taller, believing, in his heart, that he mattered as much as any other child.

'Did Santy ever come to you, Daddy?' Sheila now asked, eerily.
They could be like young witches sometimes, his daughters, with their black hair and sharp eyes.
It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind

‘There’s no need to go if you don’t want, a Leanne,’ Furlong told her. ‘Stay here with me.’
But it cut him, all the same, to see one of his own so upset by the sight of what other children craved and he could not help but wonder if she’d be brave enough or able for what the world had in store.

As Yeats himself said, ‘No one creates. The artists assembles memories.’

Yeats preferred not to talk at length about his practice, provide explanations of the content and character of his paintings, or indicate what inspired them specifically.
MacGreevy recalled that the artist did not wish his paintings to be interpreted literally, but intended the spectator to understand each picture personally - to contribute to the work of art in [their] own way.

Yeats had a sophisticated relationship with memory, never allowing his musings to become hackneyed or weighed down by sentimentality. Nostalgia played a part in his thinking, but did not define the odyssey of life that inspired his art.

It is remarkable that Yeats did not produce his first oil painting until he reached his early thirties, and only began painting in oils regularly at the age of thirty-eight.
By the time he relinquished a documentary inclination in favour of an expressionistic sensibility, he was approaching sixty.

To live amongst the Zihlni, you must prepare to accept luck as your guide and chaos as your standard.

It’s sink or swim, and you have to learn how to swim because otherwise a ton of patients sink with you.

It looks like an Indian doll. We look at the sexual organs. We seem to detect the early stages of a prnis. To think I was capable of producing that. O sits down on a stool, she is crying. We are both crying in silence. It’s an indescribable scene, life and death in the same breath. A sacrificial scene.

I feel that the woman who is busying herself between my legs, inserting the speculum, is giving birth to me.

Whenever I think about that week’s vacation in Le MontDore I picture a shimmering stretch of snow and sunshine reaching into the dark recesses of January. No doubt because our primitive memory chooses to portray the past as a basic juxtaposition of light and shade, day and night.

I tried hard to share their enthusiasm but somehow I wasn’t up to it. I was the sort of girl who went with the flow.

They had all worked hard at their subjects and had duly handed in their assignments; the he carefree attitude they chose to flaunt was part of their reward for being good students. They wanted to have fun, to go dancing and to see movies like Les Tontins Flingueurs. My primary concern during that term had been to find a solution to my abortion.

As was often the case, you couldn’t tell whether abortion was banned because it was wrong or wrong because it was banned. People judged according to the law, they didn’t judge the law.

“I was beginning to realize that he wasn’t too keen to get involved. Girls who chose to abort didn’t quite embody the moral principles of his family planning association. What he wanted was to remain at the forefront and to find out how my story would end. It was a bit like seeing the show without having to pay the price.”

I didn’t realize Jean T’s intention when I watched the film. Surprised.

Eilis saw names on headstones that she recognized, the parents or grandparents of her friends from school, men and women whom she remembered well, all gone now, held here on the edge of the town. For the moment, most of them were remembered by the living, but it was a memory slowly fading as each season passed.

‘I think about it,’ Eilis said, ‘and I can’t bear it and then I forgot about it for a minute and then when it comes back it’s as though I just heard the news. I can’t get over it.’

‘The funeral will be the day after tomorrow,’ he said.
It was the softness in his voice, the guarded way he avoided her eyes, that made her start to cry.

She watched him carefully because she knew that this was his way not only of asking her to marry him but of suggesting that marriage had been already tacitly agreed between them. It was the details of how they would live, the life he could offer her, that he was presenting now.

While Maurice smiled and seem easygoing, he did not speak to strangers and held himself back when the others did.

They moved around the city centre, slowly becoming more relaxed, beginning even to laugh sometimes as they talked. At times, it struck her, they spoke like responsible adults - he told her stories about work and about weekends - and then they were suddenly back as children or teenagers, jeering at one another or telling jokes.