“If there is a heaven, Jane Austen is sitting in a small room with Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, listening to Duran Duran, forever. If there's a hell, she's standing.”

“She's a pot-of-tea-before-I-say-boo-to-you woman. There's always a pile of warm teabags in the sink when I come down, like what a horse would leave behind.”

“Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made sense forever…”

“I live on an island called Ireland where most of the music is shite. I grew up listening to "Danny Boy"; I grew up hating Danny Boy, and all his siblings and his granny. "The pipes, the pipes are caw-haw-hawing." Anything with pipes or fiddles or even - forgive me, Paul - banjos, I detested. Songs of loss, of love, of going across the sea; songs of defiance and rebellion - I vomited on all of them.”

“She’s happier than Nicola. That’s probably true. Alcoholics can stop drinking but what is there for the children of alcoholics? Is it always too late? Probably. She doesn’t know.”

“Four generations of women--"I'm a woman," Mary said to herself--heading off on a journey in a car. One of the dead, one of them dying, one of the driving, one of them just staring out.”

“I jumped on Sinbad's bottle. Nothing happened. I didn't do it again. Sometimes when nothing happened it was really getting ready to happen”