"She knows loss intimately,
carries whole cities in her belly.
As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her.
She was splintered wood and sea water.
She reminded them of the war."

"This is all I know how to do, carry loss around until
I begin to resemble every bad memory
every terrible fear
every nightmare anyone has ever had."

"To my daughter I will say, when men come, set yourself on fire."

"You can't make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love."

“That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren't hiding anything.”

"[...] my feelings strangled inside me, like little half-formed children, bitter and bristling"

"We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves that we hid from them - they would neer sense the lack or even know there was something more they should be looking for"

"Sometimes it didn't feel like regret. It felt like a missing."

"Songs that overheated my own righteous sadness, my imagined alignment with the tragic nature of our world. How I loved to wring myself out that way, stroking my feelings until they were unbearable. I wanted all of life to feel that frantic and pressurized with portent, so even colors and weather and tastes would be more saturated. That's what the songs promised, what they trawled out of me.

"This absence in me that I could curl around like an animal"

*[...] nothing can compare to the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all - we were wet. *

"It was, of course, a miserable childhoood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while

"How the hours can pass with mere kissing is lost to me now, along with the rest of my youth"

"My chest felt too tight for me to say anything, even that I was sorry"

"He had an irresistible magnetism and an air of secret sorrow, secret knowledge"

"[...] the sadness from which I'd been running was hitting me so hard that I could barely stand upright"

"Everything we have is temporary, the joy, the suffering, everything."

"They had the beauty of the second glance, the beauty that only revealed itself with intimacy"

"She looked like an angel in the one picture I ever saw of her, but there was something empty in her eyes, a deadness, the despair of the disparity between what she looked like and what she felt herself to be."

"...she kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her sense of superiority, which is so often the secret heart of shyness"