...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them.

I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.

When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.

The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.

In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.

There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.

I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)

...sorrow binds us - I will always cherish you - my only disillusionment is unspoken words ...

Love is the door to Heaven

The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism founded upon appreciation of beauty and of intellectual distinction and of duty.

I hope that at the end of the seven years, people will say that I have been of some inspirational value to them at home in terms of inclusiveness and abroad, I look forward to representing Ireland.

I feel very English in a suit. There's something about being in a suit abroad, particularly in America, that feels empowering.

I saw Alien when I was 8 years old. To me, it was like a combination of Jaws and Star Wars and that's the movie that made me want to be a director.

Compassion is a call, a demand of nature, to relieve the unhappy as hunger is a natural call for food

There is too much theology in the Church now, and too little of the Gospel.

If you are working with people with whom you do NOT do your best work, you are out of integrity.

When you do something for world peace, peace among groups, peace among individuals, or your own inner peace, you improve the total peace picture.