“To be closed from everything, and yet to feel, to think...This is the truth of hell, stripped of its gaudy medievalisms. This loss of contact.”

“Fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie.”

“It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.”

“Everything comes home, my mother used to say; every word spoken, every shadow cast, every footprint in the sand. It can't be helped; it's part of what makes us who we are. ”

“And yet I could still hear them. As if some part of their essence had evaporated into the air, become a part of this place, ingrained, like the scent of cigarettes and burning sugar, in the woodwork and plaster. Everything was buzzing with that vanished presence, buzzing and singing and laughing louder than ever before, stone and tile and polished wood, all whispering with agitation and excitement; never still, never silent.”

“Nat Parson says it's the devil's mark.""Nat Parson's a gobshite."Maddy was torn between a natural feeling of sacrilege and a deep admiration of anyone who dared call a parson 'gobshite.”

“The dead know everything but they don't give a damn.”