“None of them could help her. She had lost all of them. They would not find out about this; she would not put it into a letter. And because of this she understood that they would never know her now....”

“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 l...”

“The idea that she would leave all of this - the rooms of the house once more familiar and warm and comforting - and go back to Brooklyn and not return for a long time again frightened her now. She ...”

“If I was ever glad to have gone, I was never glad to go.”

“Homesickness is absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't ...”

“For this I weep all my daysand throughout my lifetime grievethat I swam from my own landsand came from familiar landstowards these strange doorsto these foreign gates.”

“One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts- just mere thoughts- are as powerful as electric batteries- as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as...”

“I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man's thought. We should not speak without reason.”

“Iron turns red when it corrodes, and copper turns green. Meat turns to maggots, and thoughts turn to speech.”