Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Dogs are a habit, I think.
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
We are minor in everything but our passions.
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.
The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.
Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.
With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.
No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.
... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.
... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of trance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.