I lived in a profound loneliness at the time. I am not sure why or how it happens that a person finds themselves on the margin of life, but there I was. I was the opposite of surefooted. I couldn’t get any purchase on the ground and was unable to see how to belong anywhere.

He carried the weight of himself with a look of bemusement, as if it was he who told the world the joke of himself.

Some people understand the privilege of stillness and can sit and breathe and look and hear and smell the world turning and let what’s next wait the while.

Everybody carries a world. But certain people change the air about them.

The truth turns into a story when it grows old. We all become stories in the end.

‘Human beings are creations more profound than human beings can fathom.’ Christy mounted his bicycle. ‘That’s one of the proofs of God...’

When your spirit is uneasy, stillness can be a kind of suffering. And when you’re young, the unlived life in you, all that future, urgent and unreachable, can be unbearable.

This life is full of hurts and heals, we bruise off each other just by living, but the hope is some days we realise it.

‘Some of the things you do when you’re young are unforgivable to you when you’re old,’ he said at last.

He smiled, quoting himself: ‘This is happiness.’ It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.

He sounded a small laugh that began through his nose but defeated confinement and was soon shaking in his chest, his happiness for me like small white feathers of down in the dark, going everywhere.

There are times in a life that pass but retain a gleaming, which means they never die, and the light of them is in you still.

I went because grief has to find a home, has to find a place to settle, or the dark wings will overwhelm you and you will fall down in the road.

An endless humility was what was required of us in the last act.

She was a remarkable woman, and, like all remarkable people, became more so the more you knew her.

He sang as though he was sending the song after her, as though the air and words of it could escape the confines of time and space and soon enough reach the next place where she was gone.

Irish music was a language of its own, accommodating expression of ecstasy and rapture and lightness and fun as well as sadness and darkness and loss, and that in its rhythms and repetitions was the trace history of humanity thereabouts, going round and round.

As I think I’ve said, there are some memories you can’t lean on. You sense the railings of them but you don’t reach out a hand.

You live long enough you understand prayers can be answered on a different frequency than the one you were listening for. We all have to find a story to live by and live inside, or we couldn’t endure the certainty of suffering. That’s how it seems to me.