“Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he'd just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fair. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace.”

“He thought of his old tapes, the ones he'd had for years, the ones he'd used over and over again. Their silence was always different to the silence of a new tape: it was loaded, prickly with things recorded and erased; a silence that was like ghosts. That house was an old tape masquerading as a new one. It had recorded and erased, but it was pretending it had just come out of the cellophane. It had ghosts, but it wasn't owning up to them.”

“Then came that sigh. I wish I had had a tape recorder handy every time in my life that I heard a boy sigh at the outset of urination. What a lovely sound. So much satisfaction. Girls sigh far less often before they pee, and not with the same devotion, I think. If only I had such a recording of boys' sighs. I would lie on a pillow in the sunlight of the late afternoon, sometimes listening to Chopin, sometimes Schubert, and sometimes to the sighs, seriatim, of all the boys about to pee.”

“Most of the afternoons I would pass looking out at the pasture. I soon began seeing things. A figure emerging from the birch woods and running straight in my direction. Usually it was the Sheep Man, but sometimes it was the Rat, sometimes my girlfriend. Other times it was the sheep with the star on it's back.”

“Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the moon always returns, as do we all.”

“problems can always be looked at as oppertunities. sometimes you need a new perspective and sometimes you just need a new cup of coffee:)”