“She has gone back to Brooklyn,' her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmire Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years already when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more.”

“She has gone back to Brooklyn,' her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmire Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years already when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more.”

“You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.”

“The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.”

“I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels.”

“I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.”

“Discipline and unconditional support is earned by understanding and trust and inclusion. Not by isolation, not by nasty tricks.”

“In my 20s, as I began to travel in Europe, I found comfort in religious paintings. Even though my own belief in Catholic dogma had been shaken and weakened, I found that the beauty and the richness of the art still held me.”

“The great saints were always great innovators... They had to be very strong people... principled people. And, apart from their principles, with great tenacity they had to have great reserves of patience.”

“I love doing comedy. You don't get many good comedy scripts. They're rare. But, I do love playing comedy. Even in drama, I like to try to find the humor because I think it's very human.”

“At rare moments in history by a series of accidents never to be repeated arise flower societies in which the cult of happiness is paramount hedonistic mindless intent upon the glorious physical instant.”

“Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abru”