Nuala O'Faolain

“...friendship is something you do.”

“A bugler sounded the Last Post. Heartbreak made audible.”

“When I stay with the couple who are my closest friends, I hear them laughing and talking in bed, and sometimes in the middle of the night one of them goes down and makes tea, and when the clock goes off in the morning, they start again, talking to each other.”

“But you know, there's one simple thing I see absolutely clearly, now that I am so very old.I looked at her. The Albert Einstein hairstyle, and the bright black eyes and the sharp nose. That pallor on her face.She put her small hand on mine.The world is wonderful, she said. All its little things. It is wonderful.”

“But this upland pass was the right place for remembering how, when I was young, I learned to feel for the harshness underneath every soft appearance.”

“The wait is long, my dream of you does not end.”

“Permanence, I once copied down from a magazine, is what we all want when we can love and can be loved; change is what we want when we cannot.”

“They're fathers second, Jimmy said. They're men first.”

“I tried not to think about it. But every so often it would burst out of me - why did he do something so unkind? What had I done to deserve it? I did believe, from my experience of life and of looking at the world, that men hated women. But there were all kinds of exceptions, and I'd have bet everything that this man didn't hate me, this woman.”

“..though silence must add intensity to your intimate moments, it must also shrivel your soul to lie beside someone who doesn't talk to you.”

“...time is the third party to every relationship.”

“...when I was young, I learned to feel for the harshness under every soft appearance.”

“If there were nothing else, reading would--obviously--be worth living for.”

“My life burned inside me. Even such as it was, it was the only record of me, and it was my only creation, and something in me would not accept that it was insignificant.”

“The world is wonderful, she said. All its little things. It is wonderful.”

“Did anyone ever hear of an intelligent fantasy?”

“Do the thing that's less passive. Do the active thing. There's more of the human in that.”

“What makes a woman into a doormat? What makes her see some quite ordinary other person as a looming Goliath? And are not these relationships such an outrage to reality that they cannot last a lifetime?”

“Lovers are allowed to be as cruel as anything to the one who dissappoints them.”

“I did believe, from my experience of life and of looking at the world, that men hated women.”

“...Though it seemed trivial, now, to describe a place as if what is was, was what I could see of it.”

“There was nothing between the man and me - - nothing, not even liking. But because of the memory of some wholeness, or the hope of some regeneration, I would have dropped whatever I'd planned, just to go back to scratching around on his bed.”

“L'attesa lunga, il mio sogno di te non finito.”

“Let me just say that I am not often lonely in country places. In cities I am, like the writers of the letters. Nature doesn't break your heart: other people do. Yet, we cannot live apart from each other in bowers feeding on nectar. We're in this together, this getting through our lives, as the fact that we are word-users shows.”