How could one ever feel pessimistic here? But then one day out went the beautiful iron-sided tables and comfortable chairs, and with them the people and all of their books.
Paul Murray helps us understand the crash of the Celtic Tiger
'Maths and numbers and abstraction, these all seem like very un-Irish things; but imagining other worlds, turning reality into a hall of mirrors, these are things we are very good at.'
'You’ll understand you won’t get this soft bed for ever. Even the best Tumbleweeds can’t own their patches. There’s only one way, eventually, to achieve permanence in this place.'
'It’s the New York Herald Tribune, Jean Seberg’s voice in the middle of traffic. It’s Romaine Bohringer and Elsa Zylberstein lolling on a bench at the top of a city hill, art and hope and tragedy ahead of them.'
'This is a classic squatters’ landscape, and all the better for it. I always feel immediately at home in such makeshift places. Even the little palings have a Dickensian sort of attraction.'
'Walnut Tree Farm, the house he eventually completed, and in which he died in August, 2006, is made largely of wood. It is as close to a living thing as a building can be.'
'For indigenous people everywhere, nature is an enlargement of your mind and your sense of kin – your social mind. Trees have long been associated with knowledge.'
Richard Reynolds, guerrilla gardener, faces the Fuzz
For years I have been an illicit cultivator of neglected patches of public land. I ‘fight the filth with forks and flowers’ and until now had never been confronted with the choice between arrest and retreat.
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