“Darkness doesn't fall, he thought as he swayed to the radio, it rises up from the bottom of the sea and begins to breathe around us.”

“He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.”

“Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.”

“He realized that he had thought only about the first step, never imagined the last.”

“The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.”

“I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it.Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book”

“What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could findin the grime of the everyday...he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it.”