A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart's invisible furies on his face

• "Maybe there were no villains in my mother’s story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing"
• “If there is one thing I've learned in more than seven decades of life, it's that the world is a completely fucked-up place. You never know what's around the corner and it's often something unpleasant.”
• “It's not easy losing someone," she said. "It never goes away, does it?" "The Phantom Pain, they call it," I said. "Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.”
• “You were never a real Avery,” he hissed. “You know that, don’t you?” “I do,” I said. “But Christ on a bike, you came close. You came damned close.”
• “For the first time in my life, I started to think about my own mortality. Should I fall or have a heart attack, I could lie on the kitchen floor decomposing for weeks before anyone thought to come looking for me. I didn't even have a cat to eat me.”
• “Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.”
• “Why do they hate us so much anyway?’ I asked after a lengthy pause. ‘If they’re not queer themselves, then what does it matter to them if someone else is?’ ‘I remember a friend of mine once telling me that we hate what we fear in ourselves,’ she said with a shrug.”