William Trevor obituary

"I shall always imagine him, diffident in tweeds, arriving in a tranquil, well-ordered and beautiful place full of nice-looking people, and thinking, 'This looks lovely--I bet it isn't.'"

New York Times obituary, November 22, 2016, quoting Trevor biographer Robert Cooper

"With total conviction he has written about the rural Irish on their farms, about provincial towns, about commercial Dublin, about middle-class Protestants and the remnants of the aristocracy. He offers a complete picture of life on that island."--Gregory W. Schirmer, author of William Trevor: a study of his fiction (1990)

Mentions a celebrated short story from late in his career, "The News from Ireland," set in the 1840s famine.

Donald Hall on old age

I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. It is a pleasure to write about what I do.

"When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial....People's response to our separateness can be callous, can be good-natured, and is always condescending."

The New Yorker, January 23, 2012

Marilynne Robinson on democracy

"I think that the basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people."--New York Review of Books interview of Robinson by Barack Obama 2015