“For an Irish-Catholic boy with a nudity hang-up, it was an island of terrible freedom in a sea of "No.”

“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.. . . nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.”

“The Irish move to the sound of the guns like salmon to the sea”

“She took the sea with herNot beaches but the greyrelentless Irish sea,its rhythm and the crying gulls.”

“The terrible poetry of human nudity, I understand it at last, I who tremble for the first time in trying to read it with blasé eyes.”

“The bristling eyebrows shot up in mock surprise. Mesmerized, the boy watched them disappear under the hanging thatch of white hair. There, almost coyly, they remained just out of sight for a moment, before suddenly descending with a terrible finality and weight.”