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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.

The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.

I imagined our four bodies in aerial view. On the right side, two newlyweds beginning their first chapter, on the left, a widower and a corpse, closing the book on over thirty years of marriage.

Days passed and my mother never moved. With no control over her body, she kept wetting the bed. Twice a day my father and I would have to change the sheets around her, pulling off her pajama pants and underwear. We thought about moving her to the hospice bed but we just couldn’t.

“I never thought I was going to get married,” Isaid. “But having witnessed for the past six months what it means to keep the promise to be here for someone in sickness and in health, I find myself here, understanding.”
I talked about how love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor.

On long drives the rumble of the engine and the warmth of the gas tank below would put me to sleep, and sometimes when I’d wake up we’d already be back in our driveway. And I wished I could go back there then, back before I knew of a single bad thing.

There was a dangerous and unspoken prospect looming, that without my mother to bond us, my father and I would drift apart.

Their identities were absorbed by their children.

It felt strange to be together without my mother. The two of us never spent much time alone.

“Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always “save ten percent of yourself.” What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. “Even from Daddy, I save.” She would add.

I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it.

My grief comes in waves