“Interesting' people were her favorite hobby. She collected them: the type who did gay things late at night and smoked cigarettes in mixed company, those would have most scandalized her own mother.”

“There are only two types of people in Ireland... Those who watch The Late Late Show. And there are those who have been on The Late Late Show.”

“(...)"Flapper"— the notorious character type who bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs, where she danced in a shockingly immodest fashion with a revolving cast of male suitors.”

“8.45 a.m. My mother is in the hospital grounds smoking a cigarette. She is looking old and haggard. All the debauchery is catching up with her.”

“That night, [Black Dog] lay beside Henry, and he stroked her sharp shoulder blades and scratched behind her ears. He did this late into the night as he listened to the low and terrible moans that swept through the hallways of the house and that were not from the lonely wind but from his lonely mother, who had lost her oldest child and would never have him back again.”

“She could have taken root. She wanted to be a Rose, somebody’s Rose, their Rose—and she would have been company for the flowers. She had new memories to give them, new people to tell them of, people who would help tend to them and keep them. But they warned her. They saved her. Hazel was nobody’s Rose. For better or for worse.”