Short story writers from Ireland

"When I behold this I sighed, and said within myself, "Surely mortal man is a broomstick!" Nature sent him into the world strong and lusty, in a thriving condition, wearing his own hair on his head, the proper branches of this reasoning vegetable, till the axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs, and left him a withered trunk; he then flies to art, and puts on a periwig, valuing himself upon an unnatural bundle of hairs, all covered with powder, that never grew on his head; but now should this our broomstick pretend to enter the scene, proud of those birchen spoils it never bore, and all covered with dust, through the sweepings of the finest lady's chamber, we should be apt to ridicule and despise its vanity. Partial judges that we are of our own excellencies, and other men's defaults!"

"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."

"Instead of dirt and poison we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light."

"There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake, though all the World sees them to be in downright nonsense."

"Raillery was to say something that at first appeared a reproach or reflection; but, by some turn of wit unexpected and surprising, ended always in a compliment, and to the advantage of the person it was addressed to. And surely one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish we had rather left unsaid; nor can there anything be well more contrary to the ends for which people meet together, than to part unsatisfied with each other or themselves."

"'Tis very warm weather when one's in bed."

"Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead."

"We are so fond of one another, because our ailments are the same."

"I love good creditable acquaintance; I love to be the worst of the company."

"…one enemy can do more hurt, than ten friends can do good."

"It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffeehouse, for the voice of the kingdom. The city coffeehouses have been for some years filled with people, whose fortunes depend upon the Bank, East-India, or some other stock. Every new fund to these, is like a new mortgage to a usurer, whose compassion for a young heir, is exactly the same with that of a stockjobber to the landed gentry. At the court end of the town, the like places of resort are frequented either by men out of place, and consequently enemies to the present ministry, or by officers of the army: no wonder then if the general cry, in all such meetings, be against any peace, either with Spain or without; which, in other words, is no more than this; that discontented men desire another change of ministry; that soldiers would be glad to keep their commissions; and that the creditors have money still, and would have the debtors borrow on at the old extorting rate, while they have any security to give."

"But nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches, as to conceive how others can be in want."

"'Tis an old maxim in the schools, That flattery's the food of fools; Yet now and then your men of wit Will condescend to take a bit."

"Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style."

"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired: for in the course of things, men always grow vicious before they become unbelievers; but if you would once convince the town or country profligate, by topics drawn from the view of their own quiet, reputation, health, and advantage, their infidelity would soon drop off: This I confess is no easy task, because it is almost in a literal sense, to fight with beasts."

"If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel."

"So weak thou art, that fools thy power despise; And yet so strong, thou triumph'st o'er the wise."

"For, in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery: but in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt."

"Libertas et natale solum: Fine words! I wonder where you stole 'em."

"A set of phrases learnt by rote; A passion for a scarlet coat; When at a play to laugh, or cry, Yet cannot tell the reason why: Never to hold her tongue a minute; While all she prates has nothing in it."

"For conversation well endued; She calls it witty to be rude; And, placing raillery in railing, Will tell aloud your greatest failing."

"Those dreams that on the silent night intrude, And with false flitting shapes our minds delude … are mere productions of the brain. And fools consult interpreters in vain."

"This evil fortune, which generally attends extraordinary men in the management of great affairs, has been imputed to divers causes, that need not be here set down, when so obvious a one occurs, if what a certain writer observes be true, that when a great genius appears in the world the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

"Not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole."

"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout."

"A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter."

"Yet malice never was his aim; He lashed the vice but spared the name. No individual could resent, Where thousands equally were meant. His satire points at no defect But what all mortals may correct; For he abhorred that senseless tribe Who call it humor when they gibe."

"Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible."

"Then gave him some familiar Thumps, A College Joke to cure the Dumps."

"Conversation is but carving! Give no more to every guest Than he's able to digest. Give him always of the prime, And but little at a time. Carve to all but just enough, Let them neither starve nor stuff, And that you may have your due, Let your neighbor carve for you."

"Under an oak, in stormy weather, I joined this rogue and whore together; And none but he who rules the thunder Can put this rogue and whore asunder."

"Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy is the best bred in the company."

"Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to."

"Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners."

"I can discover no political evil in suffering bullies, sharpers, and rakes, to rid the world of each other by a method of their own; where the law hath not been able to find an expedient."

"Nothing is so great an instance of ill manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; if you flatter only one or two, you affront the rest."

"It is impossible that any thing so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind."

"Violent zeal for truth hath an hundred to one odds to be either petulancy, ambition, or pride."

"I shall be like that tree; I shall die from the top."

"Reason is a very light rider and easily shook off."

"Hail fellow, well met."

"I 've often wish'd that I had clear, For life, six hundred pounds a year; A handsome house to lodge a friend; A river at my garden's end; A terrace walk, and half a rood Of land set out to plant a wood."

"How we apples swim!"

"I have employed my time, besides ditching, in finishing, correcting, amending, and transcribing my Travels, in four parts complete, newly augmented, and intended for the press, when the world shall deserve them, or rather when a printer shall be found brave enough to venture his ears. I like the scheme of our meeting after distresses and dispersions; but the chief end I propose to myself in all my labours is to vex the world rather than divert it; and if I could compass that design, without hurting my own person or fortune, I would be the most indefatigable writer you have ever seen, without reading."

"It is a maxim, that those to whom everybody allows the second place have an undoubted title to the first."

"Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship."

"There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof, I hope, there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am not understood, it shall be concluded, that something very useful and profound is couched underneath; and again, that whatever word or sentence is printed in a different character, shall be judged to contain something extraordinary either of wit or sublime."

"Bread is the staff of life."

"I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers as with wells - a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there: and often when there is nothing in the world at the bottom besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and a-half under-ground, it shall pass, however, for wondrous deep upon no wiser reason than because it is wondrous dark"

"Books, the children of the brain."

"As boys do sparrows, with flinging salt upon their tails."

"He made it a part of his religion never to say grace to his meat."

"Laws are like Cobwebs which may catch small Flies, but let Wasps and Hornets break through. But in Oratory the greatest Art is to hide Art."

"ALL Rivers go to the Sea, but none return from it. Xerxes wept when he beheld his Army, to consider that in less than a Hundred Years they would be all Dead. Anacreon was' Choakt with a Grape-stone, and violent Joy Kills as well as violent Grief. There is nothing in this World constant but Inconstancy; yet Plato thought that if Virtue would appear to the World in her own native Dress, all Men would be Enamoured with her. But now since Interest governs the World, and Men neglect the Golden Mean, Jupiter himself, if he came on the Earth would be Despised, unless it were as he did to Danae in a Golden Shower. For Men nowadays Worship the Rising Sun, and not the Setting."

"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."

"Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old."

"A nice man is a man of nasty ideas."

"What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not we are told expressly: that they neither marry, nor are given in marriage."

"The Stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes."

"The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit."

"The latter part of a wise man’s life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former."

"Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and orators, because he that would obtrude his thoughts and reasons upon a multitude, will convince others the more, as he appears convinced himself."

"Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions, and consequently of no use to a good king or a good ministry; for which reason Courts are so overrun with politics."

"Men are contented to be laughed at for their wit, but not for their folly."

"Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps as few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold, which the owner knows not of."

"Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping."

"The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages."

"Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent."

"Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age…"

"I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed."

"No wise man ever wished to be younger."

"The Bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking."

"Complaint is the largest tribute heaven receives, and the sincerest part of our devotion."

"When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

"The two maxims of any great man at court are always to keep his countenance and never to keep his word."

"He is taller by almost the breadth of my nail, than any of his court, which alone is enough to strike an awe into the beholders."

"I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

"And he gave it for his opinion, that whosoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together."

"He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers."

"I said the thing which was not. (For they have no word in their language to express lying or falsehood.)"

"Poor Nations are hungry, and rich Nations are proud, and Pride and Hunger will ever be at Variance."

"It is a maxim among lawyers that whatever hath been done before may be done again, and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities to justify the most iniquitous opinions, and the judges never fail of directing them accordingly."

"As learned commentators view In Homer more than Homer knew."

"So geographers, in Afric maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er unhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns."

"Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension."

"Hobbes clearly proves that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature."

"So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bit 'em; And so proceed ad infinitum. Thus every poet, in his kind, Is bit by him that comes behind."

"A penny for your thoughts."

"Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?"

"The sight of you is good for sore eyes."

"'Tis as cheap sitting as standing."

"I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world."

"I won't quarrel with my bread and butter."

"She's no chicken; she's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day."

"She looks as if butter wou'dn't melt in her mouth."

"If it had been a bear it would have bit you."

"She wears her clothes, as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork."

"Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken."

"I mean you lie—under a mistake."

"Lord M. What religion is he of? Lord Sp. Why, he is an Anythingarian."

"He was a bold man that first ate an oyster."

"That's as well said, as if I had said it myself."

"You must take the will for the deed."

"Fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives."

"She has more goodness in her little finger, than he has in his whole body."

"Lord, I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing!"

"They say a carpenter's known by his chips."

"The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman."

"I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me "spade"."

"May you live all the days of your life."

"I have fed like a farmer: I shall grow as fat as a porpoise."

"I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water."

"I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs."

"I thought you and he were hand-in-glove."

"Better belly burst than good liquor be lost."

"'T is happy for him that his father was before him."

"There is none so blind as they that won't see."

"She watches him as a cat would watch a mouse."

"She pays him in his own coin."

"There was all the world and his wife."

"Sharp's the word with her."

"There's two words to that bargain."

"Hic depositum est Corpus IONATHAN SWIFT S.T.D. Hujus Ecclesiæ Cathedralis Decani, Ubi sæva Indignatio Ulterius Cor lacerare nequit, Abi Viator Et imitare, si poteris, Strenuum pro virili Libertatis Vindicatorem."

"You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come; Knock as you please, there's nobody at home."

"I know nothing of music; I would not give a farthing for all the music in the universe."

"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."

"There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate."

"As love without esteem is volatile and capricious; esteem without love is languid and cold."

"A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday."

"Gulliver's Travels is to early modern philosophy what Aristophanes’ The Clouds was to early ancient philosophy. … Swift objects to Enlightenment because it encourages a hypertrophic development of mathematics, physics and astronomy, thus returning to the pre-Socratic philosophy that Aristophanes had criticized for being unselfconscious or unable to understand man. But, unlike pre-Socratic philosophy, which had no interest in politics at all, this science wished to rule and could rule. The new science had indeed generated sufficient power to rule, but in order to do so had had to lose the human perspective. In other words, Swift denied that modern science had actually established a human or political science. All to the contrary, it had destroyed it."

"I re-read Jonathan Swift's A Tale of the Tub twice a year, but that's to punish myself. It is, I think, the most powerful, nonfictive prose in the English language, but it's a kind of vehement satire upon visionary projectors as it were, like myself, and so I figure it is a good tonic and corrective for me."

"[M]y eye fell upon a little book, in a bookseller's window, on the outside of which was written: "A TALE OF A TUB; PRICE 3d." The title was so odd, that my curiosity was excited. I had the 3d. but, then, I could have no supper. In I went, and got the little book, which I was so impatient to read, that I got over into a field, at the upper corner of Kew gardens, where there stood, a hay-stack. On the shady side of this, I sat down to read. The book was so different from any thing that I had ever read before: it was something so new to my mind, that, though I could not at all understand some of it, it delighted me beyond description; and it produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect."

"Swift has a higher reputation than he deserves. His excellence is strong sense; for his humour, though very well, is not remarkably good. I doubt whether The Tale of a Tub be his; for he never owned it, and it is much above his worldly manner."

"The rogue never hazards a figure."

"Swift’s claim to his rest from ‘savage indignation’ was also, characteristically, a literary allusion. In his First Satire, Juvenal splenetically explains why he finds himself writing satire at all. He stands in the streets of Rome, he says, and watches the monsters of vice that pass by. His gorge rises and he just has to write about it: ‘si natura negat, facit indignatio versum.’ ‘Though nature forbids, indignation makes the verse.’ Satire is forced into being by the pressure of the times. The satirist’s anger – for which, in later ages, Juvenal became a representative – makes silence impossible. It is strange to find ‘sæva indignatio’ on Swift’s memorial tablet, a tablet that notably does not contain any mention of the usual Christian consolations – any hope of salvation or another life beyond this one. It is strange because Swift had distanced the satirical writings from his own feelings: they were written in the voices of personae whose attitudes and beliefs had been chosen precisely because they were not, apparently, his own, and published anonymously or pseudonymously. Gulliver is the most famous, but there are many others: sometimes evidently foolish, sometimes worryingly lucid; self-righteous or ‘humble’; piously outraged or alarmingly dispassionate. None of them speaks for Swift. Readers have often imagined the author’s fury or disgust or horror, but without actually hearing his voice. And yet, at the end, he seemed to declare that the satire came from his own wounded heart."

"If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them."

"Giant and great as this Dean is, I say we should hoot him. Some of this audience mayn't have read the last part of Gulliver, and to such I would recall the advice of the venerable Mr. Punch to persons about to marry, and say, 'Don't'. When Gulliver first lands among the Yahoos, the naked howling wretches clamber up trees and assault him, and he describes himself as 'almost stifled with the filth which fell about him.' The reader of the fourth part of Gulliver's Travels is like the hero himself in this instance. It is Yahoo language: a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against mankind — tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene."

"As fierce a beak and talon as ever struck — as strong a wing as ever beat, belong to Swift. [...] One can gaze, and not without awe and pity, at the lonely eagle chained behind the bars [...] An immense genius: an awful downfall and ruin. So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling."

"Swift was a good writer, but had a bad heart. Even to the last he was devoured by ambition, which he pretended to despise. Would you believe that, after finding his opposition to the ministry fruitless, and, what galled him still more, contemned, he summoned up resolution to wait on Sir Robert Walpole? Sir Robert, seeing Swift look pale and ill, inquired the state of his health, with his usual old English good humour and urbanity. They were standing by a window that looked into the court-yard, where was an ancient ivy dropping towards the ground. "Sir," said Swift, with an emphatic look, "I am like that ivy; I want support." Sir Robert answered, "Why then, doctor, did you attach yourself to a falling wall?" Swift took the hint, made his bow, and retired."

"Today this Temple gets a Dean,"

"Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory."

"Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state."

"Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life."

"I want to achieve myself—little or great as I may be—for I know that there is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to my church as a human being, and accordingly I am going to Paris."

"All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light. And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine."

"My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair? My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?"

"Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence."

"Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end."

"The Irishman, finding himself in another environment, outside Ireland, very often knows how to make his worth felt. The economic and intellectual conditions of his homeland do not permit the individual to develop. The spirit of the country has been weakened by centuries of useless struggle and broken treaties. Individual initiative has been paralyzed by the influence and admonitions of the church, while the body has been shackled by peelers, duty officers and soldiers. No self-respecting person wants to stay in Ireland. Instead he will run from it, as if from a country that has been subjected to a visitation by an angry Jove."

"I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul."

"To say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy brought by the theologian, or to the accusation of immorality brought by the public prosecutor."

"Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America."

"Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul."

"You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman."

"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."

"I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book."

"The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it."

"One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot."

"Does nobody understand?"

"If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."

"The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works."

"My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire."

"When I hear the word "stream" uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristram Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon."

"There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present."

"I laugh at it today, now that I have had all the good of it. Let the bridge blow up, provided I have got my troops across... Nonetheless, that book was a terrible risk. A transparent leaf separates it from madness."

"I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women."

"[Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty slave who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity."

"For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."

"Every night as I gazed up at the window I said to myself softly the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work."

"I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood."

"But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires."

"Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."

"She dealt with moral problems the way a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind."

"He was not sure what idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched upon him took life within him like an infant hope. He stepped onward bravely."

"He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen."

"Everything in Paris is gay"

"But there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense."

"One of his sentences, written two months after his last interview with Mrs. Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse."

"One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."

"Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

"And why couldn't he have a voice too? asked Freddy Malins sharply. Is it because he's only a black? Nobody answered this question and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera."

"I know all about the honour of God, Mary Jane, but I think it's not at all honourable for the pope to turn out the women out of the choirs that have slaved there all their lives and put little whipper-snappers of boys over their heads. I suppose it is for the good of the Church if the pope does it. But it's not just, Mary Jane, and it's not right."

"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

"It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness... (271)"

"The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. (683)"

"(Of Shakespeare) A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery (243)"

"Boor, bond of thy herd, Tonight stretch full by the fire! I bleed by the black stream For my torn bough!"

"Loveward above the glancing oar"

"Frail the white rose and frail are Her hands that gave"

"How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling, Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling, Then as now."

"The fragrant hair, Falling as through the silence falleth now Dusk of the air."

"Around us fear, descending Darkness of fear above"

"And mine a shielded heart for her Who gathers simples of the moon."

"Vast wings above the lambent waters brood Of sullen day."

"Seraphim, The lost hosts awaken"

"The sly reeds whisper to the night A name — her name —"

"Gnash The thirteen teeth Your lean jaws grin with. Lash Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh."

"Ah star of evil! star of pain! Highhearted youth comes not again"

"The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay. (4.14-15)"

"Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish. (4.15-17)"

"But toms will till. I know he well."

"But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus (12.32-33)"

"For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Filstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined (may his forehead be darkened with mud who would sunder!) till Daleth, mahomahouma, who oped it closeth thereof the. Dor. (20.10-18)"

"Humme the Cheapner, Esc, overseen as we thought him, yet worthy of the naym, came at this timecoloured place where we live in our paroqial fermament one tide on another (29.30)"

"in the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of the world (83.10-12)"

"the cluekey to a worldroom beyond the roomwhorld, for scarce one, or pathetically few of his dode canal sammenlivers cared seriously or for long to doubt with Kurt Iuld van Dijke (the gravitational pull perceived by certain fixed residents and the capture of uncertain comets chancedrifting through our system suggesting the authenticitatem of his aliquitudinis) he canonicity of his existence as a tesseract. Be still, O quick! Speak him dumb! Hush ye fronds of Ulma!"

"In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!"

"I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear."

"'Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry (115.36)"

"(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. Tieckle."

"Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye. We'll meet again, we'll part once more. The spot I'll seek if the hour you'll find. My chart shines high where the blue milk's upset."

"Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing!"

"Can you nei do her, numb? asks Dolph, suspecting the answer know. Oikkont, ken you, ninny? asks Kev, expecting the answer guess. (286.25-27)"

"Quoint a quincidence! O.K. Omnius Kollidimus. As Ollover Krumwall sayed when he slepped ueber his grannyamother. Kangaroose feathers. Who in the name of thunder'd ever belevin you were that bolt?"

"Three quarks for Muster Mark! (383.1)"

"A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place, Is the Pen Mightier than the Sword? A Successful Career in the Civil Service."

"We expect you are, honest Shaun, we agreed, but from franking machines, limricked, that in the end it may well turn out, we hear to be you, our belated, who will bear these open letter. Speak to us of Emailia. (410.20-23)"

"In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen. (419.9-10)"

"Thaw! The last word in stolentelling! (424.35)"

"He caun ne'er be bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in every past that is present Quis est qui non novit quinnigan and Qui quae quot at Quinnigan's Quake! Stump! His producers are they not his consumers? Your exagmination round his factification for incamination of a warping process. Declaim! (496.34 - 497.3)"

"I’ve lapped so long. As you said. It fair takes. If I lose my breath for a minute or two don’t speak, remember! Once it happened, so it may again. (625.27 - 625.29)"

"End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. (628.13 to 3.3)"

"He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?"

"This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance: —Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany."

"Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty. … No esthetic theory, pursued Stephen relentlessly, is of any value which investigates with the aid of the lantern of tradition. What we symbolise in black the Chinaman may symbolise in yellow: each has his own tradition. Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derides them both. It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has ever been adored on the earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow or black. We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action."

"—You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. Some day I will expand that sentence into a treatise. Consider the performance of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else: and then you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise its integrity. Isn't that so? — And then? —That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then? Analysis then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing, a definitely constituted entity. You see? — Let us turn back, said Cranly."

"Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn't make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany."

"Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly's hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend's company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled: — It has not epiphanised yet, he said."

"Joyce accepted silence, exile, and cunning as a system which would sustain his life, and I've had to accept it too — incidentally, silence is the hardest part to understand."

"Joyce is right about history being a nightmare — but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."

"James Joyce teaches us that you must write on the human breath. This is the reason people get confused when they read Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. There are no breaks, so people don't understand how to read them. But Joyce wrote as he breathed. And you should write the way you breathe."

"I did not mind remaining in the Tombs, for I was resting and enjoying an absorbing book Margaret Anderson had sent me. It was A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, by James Joyce. I had not read that author before and I was fascinated by his power and originality,"

"If novel-readers don't read Mr. Joyce, novel-writers do."

"You know James Joyce said [in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] that he would forge the conscience of his race with "cunning, silence, and exile," and I have always thought that those were very weird things to say because how could you do it with silence? But maybe he means secrecy, because as far back as I could remember writing-I guess I was eight or nine years old-it was my secret thing to do. I'd hide my work and I would pretend I was doing something else, and I would write all the things that were forbidden to say. And then I just kept that up forever. I was very clear from a long time ago that I didn't have to share this with anybody-so that makes me very brave. I can always write it, throw it away, and I don't have to publish. But I do have to say it. Everything has to be expressed...Speaking of secrecy, did you notice that Alice Walker and Toni Morrison both began books with almost that same sentence: "You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you." " Alice Walker's novel [The Color Purple] begins: "You better not tell nobody but God," and then Toni Morrison [in The Bluest Eye] has the line, "Quiet as it's kept..." You see everybody has that same line; it's the same struggle to break through taboos, to find your voice. It's that same "exile, secrecy, and cunning" that Joyce was talking about."

"I guess as a minority person in America, and with a lot of perceptions that English is not my language, there is a lot of leaving me out of this culture. So a lot of my work is appropriation. I'm going to appropriate this job and these books and this language-the American language. I'm going to appropriate this country. So a lot of the allusions are to say that the Joycean soul, this Rilkean romantic poetic soul, is mine. But the way that you're all talking, it seems like I put those allusions out there to give you pain and trouble. I meant them to be fun; that was my whole point. Maybe the greatest joy of my life is to read. I love it, it's pleasurable, it's sensual. So the allusions were just my playing with my books, you know."

"In my conversation I make literary references all the time and in my head I make them even more I can hear Joyce and Shakespeare and Rilke. So why can't I use this in my writing? It's such a delight. It makes me really sad when there are so many readers who think it is off-putting to do allusions like that."

"I would offer James Joyce as an example of an extremely interesting but enormously overrated writer who really had I very little influence on anybody because nobody can write like Joyce. Who would want to? Whereas Virginia Woolf, his exact contemporary of course, has been enormously influential, and underrated because she's not in the canon. She's in some people's canon, but she's not in the canon."

"I really admired "Dubliners" a lot."

"The classical things are really quite marvelous, you know. It's just they have degenerated into a kind of "well-made-story" of our time. But you could learn forever from them...I get to one of Joyce's stories. So simple. So... so much happening in them to ordinary people."

"Einstein, Picasso, Joyce, gave us our keys; the nature of motion reached us from Proust as from the second-run movie; the Hippodrome girls went down into the eternal lake, Lindbergh had conquered time, Roosevelt had at last spoken openly to us of the demon of our house, and he had named it: fear."

"And Joyce was a poor sick fucker who probably died with his balls somewhere up around his navel. None of that for me, thanks."

"In English, you cannot even turn around a phrase or leave a dangling participle. Joyce needed to explode the English language to allow its occult meaning to emerge; Cortázar just plays around with Spanish words and grammar for the same purpose."

"[T]here were a lot of Americans, headed by one called Gertrude Stein, who wrote absolute gibberish. Then they hired a poor dotty Irishman called James Joyce, if you’ve heard about him - he was thought to be a great influence in my youth - and he wrote absolute rot, you know. He began writing quite well and you can see him going mad as he wrote, and his last books - only fit to be set for examinations at Cambridge... [Y]ou could watch him going mad sentence by sentence. If you read Ulysses, it’s perfectly sane for a little bit, and then it goes madder and madder - but that was before the Americans hired him. And then they hired him to write Finnegan’s Wake, which is gibberish."

"I regard the two major male archetypes in 20th Century literature as Leopold Bloom and Hannibal Lecter. M.D. Bloom, the perpetual victim, the kind and gentle fellow who finishes last, represented an astonishing breakthrough to new levels of realism in the novel, and also symbolized the view of humanity that hardly anybody could deny c. 1900-1950. History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce’s view of Everyman as victim. Bloom, exploited and downtrodden by the Brits for being Irish and rejected by many of the Irish for being Jewish, does indeed epiphanize humanity in the first half of the 20th Century. And he remains a nice guy despite everything that happens..."

"Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize."

"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."

"The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts."

"Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion."

"The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand."

"Acting is therefore the lowest of the arts, if it is an art at all."

"The public will accept a masterpiece, but it will not accept an attempt to write a masterpiece."

"I have always noticed that when a fellow wants to finish a play, the only way to do it is to go away to the country and leave no address."

"He must put his shoulder to the wheel and get it right; one more push, that was all that was wanted."

"Faith goes out of the window when beauty comes in at the door."

"The mind petrifies if a circle be drawn around it, and it can hardly be denied that dogma draws a circle round the mind."

"A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it."

"A great artist is always before his time or behind it."

"The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it... you and you alone make me feel that I am alive... Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough."

"My soul, so far as I understand it, has very kindly taken colour and form from the many various modes of life that self-will and an impetuous temperament have forced me to indulge in. Therefore I may say that I am free from original qualities, defects, tastes, etc. What is mine I have acquired, or, to speak more exactly, chance bestowed, and still bestows, upon me. I came into the world apparently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no impress, but capable of receiving any; of being moulded into all shapes."

"Terrible is the day when each sees his soul naked, stripped of all veil; that dear soul which he cannot change or discard, and which is so irreparably his."

"But if you want to be a painter you must go to France — France is the only school of Art."

"Never could I interest myself in a book if it were not the exact diet my mind required at the time, or in the very immediate future. The mind asked, received, and digested. So much was assimilated, so much expelled; then, after a season, similar demands were made, the same processes were repeated out of sight, below consciousness, as is the case in a well-ordered stomach."

"Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is terrible."

"It does not matter how badly you paint so long as you don't paint badly like other people."

"The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later."

"Love — but not marriage. Marriage means a four-post bed and papa and mamma between eleven and twelve. Love is aspiration: transparencies, colour, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife — you know all about her — who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbours over the way. Where, then, is the dream?"

"Injustice we worship; all that lifts us out of the miseries of life is the sublime fruit of injustice. Every immortal deed was an act of fearful injustice; the world of grandeur, of triumph, of courage, of lofty aspiration, was built up on injustice. Man would not be man but for injustice."

"It is said that young men of genius come to London with great poems and dramas in their pockets and find every door closed against them. Chatterton's death perpetuated this legend. But when I, George Moore, came to London in search of literary adventure, I found a ready welcome. Possibly I should not have been accorded any welcome had I been anything but an ordinary person."

"I will admit that an artist may be great and limited; by one word he may light up an abyss of soul; but there must be this one magical and unique word. Shakespeare gives us the word, Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving, gives us the word, Tourgueneff gives it with miraculous certainty; but Henry James, no; a hundred times he flutters about it; his whole book is one long flutter near to the one magical and unique word, but the word is not spoken; and for want of the word his characters are never resolved out of the haze of nebulae. You are on a bowing acquaintance with them; they pass you in the street, they stop and speak to you, you know how they are dressed, you watch the colour of their eyes."

"One thing that cannot be denied to the realists: a constant and intense desire to write well, to write artistically. When I think of what they have done in the matter of the use of words, of the myriad verbal effects they have discovered, of the thousand forms of composition they have created, how they have remodelled and refashioned the language in their untiring striving for intensity of expression for the very osmazome of art, I am lost in ultimate wonder and admiration."

"We all want notoriety; our desires on this point, as upon others, are not noble, but the human is very despicable vermin and only tolerable when it tends to the brute, and away from the evangelical."

"Humanity is a pigsty, where lions, hypocrites, and the obscene in spirit congregate."

"All reformers are bachelors."

"After all there is but one race — humanity."

"The difficulty in life is the choice."

"The wrong way always seems the more reasonable."

"It would appear that practical morality consists in making the meeting of men and women as casual as that of animals."

"I am filled with pride when I think of the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead."

"One must be in London to see the spring."

"We humans are more complicated than animals, and we love through the imagination."

"Self is man's main business; all outside of self is uncertain, all comes from self, all returns to self."

"...day before yesterday I read "Esther Waters" for the 60th time. It is a book I keep for very bad days, and it never fails me...I don't know why "Esther Waters" has this magic effect on me - because I do not like horses particularly or care about racing [. . . . . .] or servants (White. Black ones are nice). Or religion - Still there it is. Magic for me. Every time."

"George Moore had a ceaseless preoccupation with painting and the theatre, within certain limits a technical understanding of both; whatever idea possessed him, courage and explosive power; but sacrificed all that seemed to other men good breeding, honour, friendship, in pursuit of what he called the root facts of life."

"I told him that he was more mob than man, always an enthusiastic listener or noisy interrupter. Yet I admired him and found myself his advocate. I wrote to Lady Gregory: "He is constantly so likeable that one can believe no evil of him, and then in a moment a kind of a devil takes hold of him, his voice changes, his look changes, and he becomes hateful... It is so hard not to trust him, and yet he is quite untrustworthy. He has what Talleyrand calls 'the terrible gift of familiarity.'""

"I can't tell you how urbane and sprightly the old poll parrot was; and (this is what I think using the brain does for one), not a pocket, not a crevice, of pomp, humbug, respectability in him: he was fresh as a daisy."

"It was quite dark when he went by the towers of Tor, where archers shoot ivory arrows at strangers lest any foreigner should alter their laws, which are bad, but not to be altered by mere aliens."

"I imagine that as one penetrated out from some enormous forest of the tropics, the wild beasts would become fewer, the gloom would lighten, and the horror of the place would slowly lift. Yet as one emerges nearer to the edge of London, and nearer to the beautiful influence of the hills, the houses become uglier, the streets viler, the gloom deepens, the errors of civilisation stand bare to the scorn of the fields."

"It is many a year ago, they say, when the vintage was last gathered in from the vineyards that I knew, where it is all desert now. It was a radiant day, and the people of the city were dancing by the vineyards, while here and there one played upon the kalipac. The purple flowering shrubs were all in bloom, and the snow shone upon the Hills of Hap. Outside the copper gates they crushed the grapes in vats to make the syrabub. It had been a goodly vintage. In the little gardens at the desert's edge men beat the tambang and the tittibuk, and blew melodiously the zootibar."

"Indeed when we trace it all back to its origin we find at the beginning of this unhappy story a man who was only an emperor and wished to be something more. He would have ruled the world but has only meddled with it; and his folly has brought misery to millions, and there lies his broken dream on the broken earth."

"Once, as Mung went his way athwart the Earth and up and down its cities and across its plains, Mung came upon a man who was afraid when Mung said: “I am Mung!”"

"Then said the people to the prophet: “Shall not black hills draw round in some forsaken land, to make a vale-wide cauldron wherein the molten rock shall seethe and roar, and where the crags of mountains shall be hurled upward to the surface and bubble and go down again, that there our enemies may boil for ever?”"

"And cities arose and shed their houses in dust, and ever the desert returned again to its own, and covered over and hid the last of all that had troubled its repose."

"How much do you know?" she said. "Do you know that dreams are illusion?"

"I hope that when London is clean passed away and the defeated fields come back again, like an exiled people returning after a war, they may find some beautiful thing to remind them of it all; because we have loved a little that swart old city."

"All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships."

"What should a man do with the sword of Welleran?"

"The source of all imagination is here in our fields, and Creation is beautiful enough for the furthest flights of the poets. What is called realism only falls far from these flights because it is too meticulously concerned with the detail of material; mere inventories of rocks are not poetry; but all the memories of crags and hills and meadows and woods and sky that lie in a sensitive spirit are materials for poetry, only waiting to be taken out, and to be laid before the eyes of such as care to perceive them."

"Once I found out the secret of the universe. I have forgotten what it was, but I know that the Creator does not take Creation seriously, for I remember that He sat in Space with all His work in front of Him and laughed."

"I know of the boons that machinery has conferred on men, all tyrants have boons to confer, but service to the dynasty of steam and steel is a hard service and gives little leisure to fancy to flit from field to field."

"Many authors, when one meets them for the first time, are comparatively unimpressive compared with their books. But Lord Dunsany, who died last week, never disappointed. He was every inch a poet, playwright, storyteller, Irish peer, big-game hunter, painter, modeller in clay, Conservative politician, soldier and country gentleman, all of which occupations he followed In the busiest and most-enjoyed life I have seen. He was a tall, splendid-looking man with a young voice, decided opinions and boundless energy. He was very happily married and had the good manners of an Edwardian autocrat."

"One of the greatest writers of [the 20th] century."

"I am reminded of a comment Lord Dunsany made. He saw a script which had a gorgeous description of a sun setting over a landscape, and this had to be crossed out, and it said, "Sun sets, left." This is what I mean by the visuals being supplied by someone else, in that case the stage designer and the director."

"...by the time I came along (I was the fourth kid), there was a lot of mythology around, mostly in kids' versions, but what's the difference. Beautiful big books with lots of illustrations. I plunged around in those books and in everything else; the Norse myths were my favorite. Sometime in here I also came across Dunsany's Dreamer's Tales, which proved to be another revelation. Dunsany was important to me because he was the first writer I had come across who wrote what I would call "pure fantasy." Today his works probably seem old-fashioned-I know my kids didn't take to him at all. He wrote in a Biblical-grand-Irish-Romantic language, a very mannered style. But as a kid in the 1930s, I wasn't so far from that early-twentieth-century mannerism. What I saw in Dunsany were these absolutely pure invented fantasies: a mythology that one person had made up. The idea that people could invent their own myths, use their imagination to the limit was a wonderful discovery."

"Inventor of a new mythology and weaver of surprising folklore, Lord Dunsany stands dedicated to a strange world of fantastic beauty . . . unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in the creation of a gorgeous and languorous world of incandescently exotic vision. No amount of mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany's pervasive charm."

"No one can imitate Dunsany, and probably everyone who's ever read him has tried."

"The King of Elfland’ s Daughter is the most purely beautiful thing Lord Dunsany has written. There may be better or more exciting things in some of the short tales, but nowhere else has he had such a long run on that Pegasus of his that carries him east of the East and west of the West — not curving round the world, as he once said to me, but going on straight into regions that the makers of the Arabian tales of enchantment knew, or which lay in neighbouring kingdoms of romance."

"These plays and stories have for their continual theme the passing away of gods and men and cities before the mysterious power which is sometimes called by some great god's name but more often 'Time.' His travellers, who travel by so many rivers and deserts and listen to sounding names none heard before, come back with no tale that does not tell of vague rebellion against that power, and all the beautiful things they have seen get something of their charm from the pathos of fragility. This poet who has imagined colours, ceremonies and incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar Allen Poe or of De Quincey, and remembered as much fabulous beauty as Sir John Mandeville, has yet never wearied of the most universal of emotions and the one most constantly associated with the sense of beauty; and when we come to examine those astonishments that seemed so alien we find that he has but transfigured with beauty the common sights of the world."

""What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually— our sense of personality is a sense of outrage and we'll never get outside of it."But the hold of the country was that, she considered, it could be thought of in terms of oneself, so interpreted."

"Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat."

"This is the worst of love, this unmeant mystification — someone smiling and going out without saying where, or a letter arriving, being read in your presence, put away, not explained, or: "No, alas, I can't to-night" on the telephone — that, one person having set up without knowing, the other cannot undo without the where? who? why? that brings them both down a peg. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies."

"And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is."

"It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you gathers up defensively: something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be quite the same again. These new unsmiling lights, reflections and objects are to become your memories, riveted to you closer than friends or lovers, going with you, even, into the grave: worse, they may become dear and fasten like so many leeches on your heart."

"Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself — in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience."

"Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem."

"Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain."

"The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends."

"[T]here is a flaw in civilization from the instant it has to admit fear."

"[U]ntruths are thieves, robbing us of a birthright."

"Cicero, in invoking the law of heaven, invoked what was by nature of heaven: law — inviolable principle, better than the vacillating gods."

"It is thought that women inspire by their beauty; more often they do so by their longings."

"I am sick of the governessy attitude of our age, which is coming to be more genuinely presumptuous, nosier and more busybody than the Victorian."

"Though the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword speaks louder and stronger at any given moment."

"a Yea might turn in to a Nae and vice versa if a sufficient quantity of wordage was applied. In other talk you argument out until you get the answer you want."

"I think women should make a habit of canceling the wars."

"I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years."

"In my College days I had been Auditor of the Historical Society — a post which corresponds to the Presidency of the Union in Oxford or Cambridge — and had got medals, or certificates, for History, Composition and Oratory. I had been President of the Philosophical Society; had got Honours in pure mathematics. I had won numerous silver cups for races of various kinds. I had played for years in the University football team, where I had received the honour of a “cap”! I was physically immensely strong. In fact I feel justified in saying I represented in my own person something of that aim of university education mens sana in corpore sano"

"Do not grieve for her! Who knows, but she may have found the joy she sought? Love and patience are all that make for happiness in this world; or in the world of the past or of the future; of the living or the dead. She dreamed her dream; and that is all that any of us can ask."

"We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things."

"Listen to them — the children of the night. What music they make."

"No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be."

"Despair has its own calms."

"One and all we felt that the holy calm that lay like sunshine over the wasted face and form was only an earthly token and symbol of the calm that was to reign for ever."

"You think to baffle me, you—with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher's."

"Seven years ago we all went through the flames. And the happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured."

"Logically speaking, even the life of an actor has no preface. He begins, and that is all. And such beginning is usually obscure; but faintly remembered at the best. Art is a completion; not merely a history of endeavour. It is only when completeness has been obtained that the beginnings of endeavour gain importance, and that the steps by which it has been won assume any shape of permanent interest. After all, the struggle for supremacy is so universal that the matters of hope and difficulty of one person are hardly of general interest. When the individual has won out from the huddle of strife, the means and steps of his succeeding become of interest, either historically or in the educational aspect — but not before. From every life there may be a lesson to some one; but in the teeming millions of humanity such lessons can but seldom have any general or exhaustive force. The mere din of strife is too incessant for any individual sound to carry far. Fame, who rides in higher atmosphere, can alone make her purpose heard. Well did the framers of picturesque idea understand their work when in her hand they put a symbolic trumpet."

"The fame of an actor is won in minutes and seconds, not in years. The latter are only helpful in the recurrence of opportunities; in the possibilities of repetition. It is not feasible, therefore, adequately to record the progress of his work. Indeed that work in its perfection cannot be recorded; words are, and can be, but faint suggestions of awakened emotion. The student of history can, after all, but accept in matters evanescent the judgment of contemporary experience. Of such, the weight of evidence can at best incline in one direction; and that tendency is not susceptible of further proof. So much, then, for the work of art that is not plastic and permanent. There remains therefore but the artist. Of him the other arts can make record in so far as external appearance goes. Nay, more, the genius of sculptor or painter can suggest — with an understanding as subtle as that of the sun-rays which on sensitive media can depict what cannot be seen by the eye — the existence of these inner forces and qualities whence accomplished works of any kind proceed. It is to such art that we look for the teaching of our eyes. Modern science can record something of the actualities of voice and tone. Writers of force and skill and judgment can convey abstract ideas of controlling forces and purposes; of thwarting passions; of embarrassing weaknesses; of all the bundle of inconsistencies which make up an item of concrete humanity. From all these may be derived some consistent idea of individuality. This individuality is at once the ideal and the objective of portraiture."

"I could not but be struck by the strangers. The lady was a big, handsome blonde woman, clever-looking and capable. But the man riveted my attention. He was dark, and forceful, and masterful, and ruthless. I have never seen so iron a countenance. I did not have much time to analyse the face; the bustle of arrival prevented that. But an instant was enough to make up my mind about him. We separated in the carriage after cordial wishes that we might meet again. When we were on the platform, I asked Irving: "Who is that man?" "Why," he said, " I thought I introduced you!" "So you did, but you did not mention the names of the others!" He looked at me for an instant and said inquiringly as though something had struck him: "Tell me, why do you want to know?" "Because," I answered, "I never saw any one like him. He is steel! He would go through you like a sword!" "You are right!" he said. "But I thought you knew him. That is Burton — Captain Burton who went to Mecca!"

"My first impression of the man as of steel was consolidated and enhanced. He told us, amongst other things, of the work he had in hand. Three great books were partially done. The translation of the Arabian Nights, the metrical translation of Camoëns, and the Book of the Sword. These were all works of vast magnitude and requiring endless research. But he lived to complete them all."

"Burton had a most vivid way of putting things — especially of the East. He had both a fine imaginative power and a memory richly stored not only from study but from personal experience. As he talked, fancy seemed to run riot in its alluring power; and the whole world of thought seemed to flame with gorgeous colour. Burton knew the East. Its brilliant dawns and sunsets; its rich tropic vegetation, and its arid fiery deserts; its cool, dark mosques and temples; its crowded bazaars; its narrow streets; its windows guarded for out-looking and from in-looking eyes; the pride and swagger of its passionate men, and the mysteries of its veiled women; its romances; its beauty; its horrors."

"Go home, Johann — Walpurgis nacht doesn't concern Englishmen."

"THE DEAD TRAVEL FAST"

"Be careful of my guest — his safety is most precious to me. Should aught happen to him, or if he be missed, spare nothing to find him and ensure his safety. He is English and therefore adventurous. There are often dangers from snow and wolves and night. Lose not a moment if you suspect harm to him. I answer your zeal with my fortune."

"As to its effect, I had no adequate words. I can only say that after a few seconds of stony silence following his collapse I burst out into something like a violent fit of hysterics…. In those moments of our mutual emotion he too had found a friend and knew it. Soul had looked into soul! From that hour began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between two men."

"Much has been said of his relation to Henry Irving, but I wonder how many were really aware of the whole depth and significance of that association. Bram seemed to give up his life to it. .. I say without any hesitation that never have I seen, never do I expect to see, such absorption of one man’s life in the life of another."

"Tennyson had at times that lifting of the upper lip which shows the canine tooth, and which is so marked an indication of militant instinct."

"He have done this alone; all alone! from a ruin tomb in a forgotten land. What more may he not do when the greater world of thought is open to him?"

"gothics are slow. I had somebody that had never read Dracula before and they read it and they told me, “It’s just a bunch of journal entries. It’s such a boring piece of crap.” And I said, “Yes, it is.” Well, not just journal entries, but like train tape timetables and lots of stuff. It does tell a story, and it does get kind of creepy, but they wanted the vampire jumping out on page two and biting into somebody, and that just doesn’t happen."

"Strong men are made by opposition; like kites they go up against the wind."

"Happiness is not essential to the artist; happiness never creates anything but memories."

"Just as work is the curse of the drinking classes of this country," [Wilde] said laughing, "so education is the curse of the acting classes."

"Shaw's relations with women have always been gallant, coy even. The number he has surrendered to physically have been few – perhaps not half a dozen in all – the first man to have cut a path through the theatre and left it strewn with virgins."

"My dear Duke, I know nothing of the joys of homo-sexuality. You must speak to my friend Oscar about that. And yet, if Shakespeare had asked me, I would have had to submit."

"Christ goes deeper than I do, but I have had a wider experience."

"Casanova! My dear man, Casanova is not worthy to untie my bootstrings!"

"I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers."

"... truth was a mortal enemy of beauty."

"Frank Harris has no feelings. It is the secret of his success. Just as the fact that he thinks other people have none either is the secret of the failure that lies in wait for him somewhere on the way of Life."

"The pleasure of being with you is in the clash of personality, the intellectual battle, the war of ideas. To survive you one must have a strong brain, an assertive ego, a dynamic character. In your luncheon-parties, in old days, the remains of the guests were taken away with the débris of the feast. I have often lunched with you in Park Lane and found myself the only survivor."

"Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will."

"Finality is death. Perfection is finality. Nothing is perfect. There are lumps in it."

"Because our lives are cowardly and sly, Because we do not dare to take or give, Because we scowl and pass each other by, We do not live; we do not dare to live."

"If I asked her master he'd give me a cask a day; But she, with the beer at hand, not a gill would arrange! May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and may The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange."

"I would think Until I found Something I can never find; – Something Lying On the ground, In the bottom Of my mind."

"The duty of a lyrical poet is not to express or explain, it is to intensify life."

"Speech and prose are not the same thing. They have different wave-lengths, for speech moves at the speed of light, where prose moves at the speed of the alphabet, and must be consecutive and grammatical and word-perfect. Prose cannot gesticulate. Speech can sometimes do nothing else."

"There is no dealing with great sorrow as if it were under the control of our wills. It is a terrible phenomenon, whose laws we must study, and to whose conditions we must submit, if we would mitigate it."

"The world," he resumed after a short pause, "has no faith in any man's conversion; it never forgets what he was, it never believes him anything better, it is an inexorable and stupid judge."

"How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long – the care of cares – the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven – and straight you find a new stratum there."

"There comes with old age a time when the heart is no longer fusible or malleable, and must retain the form in which it has cooled down."

"He has attained supremacy in one particular line: he succeeds in inspiring a mysterious terror better than any other writer."

"I waked quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I awaken easily, and for a minute I could not remember what it was. Then I remembered, the old reason: he had not come home, my father."

"We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable."

"The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed."

"Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you'd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more."

"All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people."

"[On the banning of (her then) four novels in Ireland] I believe that mental disturbance by literature is a healthy and invigorating thing. We have plenty of comfortable and easy prose all around us, but it's by abrasion that people's prejudices are aroused."

"It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence."

"Never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty."

"She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give."

"That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open."

"It is not that you have to be happy-that would be asking too much-but if it gets too painful that sense of wonderment, or joy, dies, and with it the generosity so necessary to create. (1984)"

"Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul. (Vogue, April 1985)"

"I never write about simple, gentle things, and I never will. It's not being sensational. I hate sensational books. Unless we look at dark and covered painful wounds, we can never heal them. (1995)"

"[A novel] has a right and a duty to ask very painful and difficult questions. It doesn't solve them, but it asks them. (1995)"

"I don't think I have ever learned the game of men and women. To this day I regret the fact that it's like a dance I couldn't learn."

"Writing of any experience, male or female, is difficult. One has to keep one's eyes and ears open and then delve into the imagination."

"To make a story both more alive and more suspenseful one has to think of altering the point of view of each chapter. In doing that one changes styles because each person thinks differently. I find it stimulating though a little daunting, but as reader and writer I am not interested in anything less."

"(Do think of your work as political?) O'BRIEN: Well, everything is political: one's upbringing, the culture in which one grows up, even religion is political, whether we like it or not. Religion is supposed to be spiritual but we all know it isn't."

"(Do you have to cultivate a distance between you and your friends to have space to write?) O'BRIEN: Yes. One must live the inner life to the utmost. Samuel Beckett wrote a preface to a book of Jack Yeats's paintings, and he said: "the artist who stakes his being comes from nowhere. And he has no brothers." Well, of course, he does come from somewhere and that somewhere informs and permeates the work as it did for Samuel Beckett and it did for Jack Yeats, but solitary is how an artist has to be. It's crucial to the work. And painful for the life!"

"County Clare inhabits my thoughts and my writing wherever I happen to be. Ireland is always speaking a story and I have to search for it. (Is it always familiar territory?) O'BRIEN: Yes and no. With each book I hope to dig deeper. That is all I ask."

"There's nothing like obstacle to make a writer"

"When we're young, we leave home and we think we're leaving behind us our roots. And we do leave them behind for a time. And then they catch up with us, and they twine themselves around us and that's a great thing."

"one of the things about writing is that each book is a beginning. Each book is another hurdle up the ladder or up the mountain of one's country and one's own sensibility."

"What literature does, if it's any good, is to open the soul, the mind, the psyche and the body of a reader. I'm always looking for that - and in some cases getting into trouble for even attempting it."

"A lot of young writers send me books and they want to be published, 'to be famous, to be known'. That isn't the job. That comes later, if it comes at all. A writer has to love that vocation - and it is an extremely unbefriended and difficult vocation."

"I believe in Kafka's maxim that literature, whether it be poetry or prose, is disturbing. It's many other things as well- it can be exciting; it can be an ecstasy; it can be, to use a modern word, it can be a trip. But the inner core of human existence is about disturbance and writing comes from conflict."

"I suppose the themes we choose - because there are many stories I could have chosen to write about, but I chose this one - are as much about us, the writer, as about the story. You have to live a story. You have to take it in and stay with it and hopefully bring it back out"

"What has happened (it's funny, but it's also very serious) is that language is used now to cover up language is used as a deception, in every country, in every area, whereas great language and the imperative of great language is truth."

"Forests have always been used in stories down the centuries. The forest is life - there's beauty, there's danger, there's threats, and, at the same time, potential safety. So without wanting to sound too pompous, I suppose a forest is a metaphor."

"A work of art has a big space. If for a moment we think of something else - and I won't dodge the question of Picasso's 'Guernica', or Pieter Bruegel's 'Hunters' - they're huge canvasses in which everything is allowed. Everything is painted in, everything is depicted, so that the viewer enters the whole world of that story or that tragedy, or that war or that hunt. It is quite different — and must be — to reportage."

"Literature and spirituality are very close. It doesn't matter if there's erotica in the book, or if there is very vivid description, or if there's hatred in the book. I think God and the gods watch over the writer or poet who for the duration of the writing is kind of blessed, is in a spell - not in a happy spell and not in a sweet or calm one, but to stir up that part of the mind, to find knowledge and words and narrative that one did not know one had, is a mystery. And having been brought up very religiously, I ascribe that mystery to God. The Greeks ascribed it to 'the gods'. But whether it's singular or plural, it is an energy, a force outside oneself, that comes to cause this stuff."

"She has always ridden the passions as if they were a magnificent horse."

"Certainly I admire Edna O'Brien's work greatly. It would be difficult for any Irish woman writer to ignore the impact of her work during the repressive Ireland of the 1960s."

"(Tell us about your favorite short story.) “Old Wounds,” by Edna O’Brien, haunts me as though I’ve lived it."

"Edna O'Brien transforms the lives of Irish women into a liturgy of premonition, doom, and enigmatic redemption...For all O’Brien’s sacramental melancholy, she exudes a worldly passion for the moment. She seduces readers with her direct, piercing gaze and pleases with the rhythms of her storytelling diction. Most of these tales are set in a territory between human brutality and inexplicable salvation. O’Brien takes it all in—the small-mindedness, gossip, superstition, death of the spirit, and destruction of the body. Her characters dance on the edge of the grave, yet, perhaps because despair is for Catholics the only unpardonable sin, O’Brien often tosses them a mysterious line of absolution and hope."

"...her perspective is women centered but not feminist: her works usually depict the traps of femininity rather than liberation."

"Man is to be held only by the slightest chains; with the idea that he can break them at pleasure, he submits to them in sport."

"Obtain power, then, by all means; power is the law of man; make it yours."

"Surely it is much more generous to forgive and remember, than to forgive and forget."

"We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters."

"A love-match was the only thing for happiness, where the parties could any way afford it."

"Our Irish blunders are never blunders of the heart."

"To our unhappy sex genius and sensibility are the most treacherous gifts of Heaven. Why should we cultivate talents merely to gratify the caprice of tyrants? Why seek for knowledge, which can prove only that our wretchedness is irremediable? If a ray of light break in upon us, it is but to make darkness more visible; to show us the narrow limits, the Gothic structure, the impenetrable barriers of our prison."

"My mother took too much, a great deal too much, care of me; she over-educated, over-instructed, over-dosed me with premature lessons of prudence: she was so afraid that I should ever do a foolish thing, or not say a wise one, that she prompted my every word, and guided my every action. So I grew up, seeing with her eyes, hearing with her ears, and judging with her understanding, till, at length, it was found out that I had not eyes, ears or understanding of my own."

"A man who sells his conscience for his interest will sell it for his pleasure. A man who will betray his country will betray his friend."

"Alarmed successively by every fashionable medical terror of the day, she dosed her children with every specific which was publicly advertised or privately recommended…The consequence was, that the dangers, which had at first been imaginary, became real: these little victims of domestic medicine never had a day's health: they looked, and were, more dead than alive."

"It is unjust and absurd of those advancing in years, to expect of the young that confidence should come all and only on their side: the human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return."

"I have made up my mind to like no novels really, but Miss Edgeworth's, yours and my own."

"She was a nice little unassuming ‘Jeanie Deans’-looking bodie,’ as we Scotch say—and, if not handsome, certainly not ill-looking. Her conversation was as quiet as herself. One would never have guessed she could write her name; whereas her father talked, not as if he could write nothing else, but as if nothing else was worth writing."

"That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business. It is screamingly obvious in Maria Edgeworth's tales, which must have done unspeakable damage to ordinary people.—Be good, and you'll have money. Be wicked, and you'll be utterly penniless at last, and the good ones will have to offer you a little charity."

"Miss Edgeworth is a most agreeable person, very natural, clever, and well informed, without the least pretensions of authorship. She had never been in a large society before, and she was followed and courted by all the persons of distinction in London, with an avidity almost without example. The court paid to her gave her an opportunity of showing her excellent understanding and character. She took every advantage of her situation, either for enjoyment or observation; but she remained perfectly unspoiled by the homage of the great."

"Miss Edgeworth was of diminutive stature, and apparently not beautiful. No portrait was ever taken. It seems from Scott's descriptions of her that her appearance faithfully represented the combined vivacity and good sense and amiability of her character. No one had stronger family affections, and the lives of very few authors have been as useful and honourable. The didacticism of the stories for children has not prevented their permanent popularity. Her more ambitious efforts are injured by the same tendency. She has not the delicacy of touch of Miss Austen, more than the imaginative power of Scott. But the brightness of her style, her keen observation of character, and her shrewd sense and vigour make her novels still readable, in spite of obvious artistic defects. Though her puppets are apt to be wooden, they act their parts with spirit enough to make us forgive the perpetual moral lectures."

"When I came back to Dublin, I was courtmartialled in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence."

"He was born an Englishman and remained one for years."

"An author's first duty is to let down his country."

"There's no bad publicity except an obituary."

"The sun was in mind to come out but having a look at the weather it was in lost heart and went back again."

"It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody."

"Mother, they would praise my balls if I hung them high enough."

"I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer."

"I only drink on two occasions — When I am thirsty and when I'm not."

"As regards drink, I can only say that in Dublin during the Depression when I was growing up, drunkenness was not regarded as a social disgrace. To get enough to eat was regarded as an achievement. To get drunk was a victory."

"Brendan described himself as a drinker with a writing problem, but what he really was a painter with a writing problem. No matter in what country of the globe he resided, or how many luminaries he met, the would always be a painter in his soul. If he had remained one for his livelihood, he could still be alive today."

"Brendan lit a bonfire under the arse of Irish literature. He took it by the scruff of the neck and dragged it kicking and screaming into the 20th century."

"If the English hoard words like misers, the Irish spend them like sailors; and Brendan Behan … sends language out on a swaggering spree, ribald, flushed, and spoiling for a fight."

"[Brendan Behan was] too young to die, but too drunk to live."

"I write exactly as I speak, so therefore I would not say any writer influenced me at all."

"I don't say I was 'proceeding down a thoroughfare', I say I 'walked down the road'. I don't say I 'passed a hallowed institute of learning', I say I 'passed a school'. You don't wear all your jewellery at once. You're much more believable if you talk in your own voice."

"It's like if you don't go to a dance you can never be rejected but you'll never get to dance either."

"(A) writer, a man I loved and he loved me and we got married and it was great and is still great. He believed I could do anything, just as my parents had believed all those years ago, and I started to write fiction and that took off fine. And he loved Ireland, and the fax was invented so we writers could live anywhere we liked, instead of living in London near publishers."

"Suddenly they asked me, as only the French would, ‘Madame, what is your philosophy of life?’ What a cosmic question, but I had to answer, and answer quickly, because it was live. So I said, in French, ‘I think that you’ve got to play the hand that you’re dealt and stop wishing for another hand.’"

"I once tried to write a novel about revenge. It's the only book I didn't finish. I couldn't get into the mind of the person who was plotting vengeance."

"I often wonder that if I had met Hitler, I reckon I might have found some streak of decency in him."

"On my 100th birthday, piloting Gordon and myself into the side of a mountain."

"She had time for everybody. Perhaps because her stories came from all of us and for all of us."

"She rearranged a whole wall of books so it was completely full of Irish writers. She didn't look like she was any trouble so no one caught her."

"She had that great gift of making you feel life was worth living. A very, very special person."

"She was charming, intelligent, warm, generous in her time, with her effort, with her work. I just had the greatest of respect for her because she suffered badly from arthritis, and she had a lot of pain, and she never complained, you know."

"Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful."

"The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before."

"Hours and hours of insanity and escape. The projects were a victim of theft and wind. The downdrafts made their own weather. Plastic bags caught on the gusts of summer wind. Old domino players sat in the courtyard, playing underneath the flying litter. The sound of the plastic bags was like rifle fire. If you watched the rubbish for a while you could tell the exact shape of the wind. Perhaps in a way it was alluring, like little else around it: whole, bright, slapping curlicues and large figure eights, helixes and whorls and corkscrews. Sometimes a bit of plastic caught against a pipe or touched the top of the chain-link fence and backed away gracelessly, like it had been warned. The handles came together and the bag collapsed. There were no tree branches to be caught on. One boy from a neighboring flat stuck a lineless fishing pole out the window but he didn't catch any. The bags often stayed up in one place, as if they were contemplating the whole gray scene, and then would take a sudden dip, a polite curtsy, and away."

"Grow up, brother. Pack your bags, go somewhere you matter. They deserve nothing. They're not Magdalenes. You're just a bum among them. You're looking for the poor man within? Why don't you humble yourself at the feet of the rich for once? Or does your God just love useless people?"

"If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures."

"I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student — thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories."

"We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant."

"You know, when you're young, God sweeps you up. He holds you there. The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All those days when you can't hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again."

"Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get."

"There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream."

"I knew then that it would end badly, her and Corrigan, these children. Someone or other was going to get torn asunder. And yet why shouldn't they fall in love, if even just for a short while? Why shouldn't Corrigan live his life in the body that was hurting him, giving up in places? Why shouldn't he have a moment of release from this God of his? It was a torture shop for him, worrying about the world, having to deal with intricacies when what he really wanted was to be ordinary and do the simple thing.Yet nothing was simple, certainly not simplification. Poverty, chastity, obedience — he had spent his life in fealty to them, but was unarmed when they turned against him."

"We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable."

"She recognized a new depth in him, a candor. The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. War was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple - hate your enemy, know nothing of him. It was, he claimed, the most un-American of wars, no idealism behind it, only about defeat."

"Death, the greatest democracy of them all. The world's oldest complaint. Happens to us all. Rich and poor. Fat and thin. Fathers and daughters. Mothers and sons."

"There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it's the last we'll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots, an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times."

"At a certain stage every single thing can be a sign."

"You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lift miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day untouched, some old, lost sweet-tasting time. But there it was again, the girl's spreading bloodstain."

"The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth."

"Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew. There wasn't much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar."

"Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. even of people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, he said, it had to be fought for."

"Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of the ashes of chance."

"He believed in walking beautifully, elegantly. It had to work as a kind of faith that he would get to the other side. He had fallen once while training - once exactly, so he felt it couldn't happen again, it was beyond possibility. A single flaw was necessary anyway. In any work of beauty there had to be one small thread left hanging."

"Everything had purpose, signal, meaning."

"The core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air. New things were possible with the human form. It went beyond equilibrium. He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake."

"It was so much like having sex with the wind. It complicated things and blew away and softly separated and slid back around him. The wire was about pain too: it would always be there, jutting into his feet, the weight of the bar, the dryness of the throat, the throb of his arms, but the joy was losing the pain so that it no longer mattered. So too with his breathing. He wanted his breath to enter the wire so that he was nothing. This sense of losing himself. Every nerve. Every cuticle. He hit it on the towers. The logic became unfixed. It was the point where there was no time. The wind was blowing and his body could have experienced it years in advance."

"He wondered if that was what the moment of death was about, the noise of the world and then ease away from it."

"The theater began shortly after lunch. His fellow judges and court officers and reporters and even the stenographers were already talking about it as if it were another of those things that just happened in the city. One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief."

"He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn't care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NE YORK FUCKIN' CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would."

"New York kept going forward precisely because it didn't give a good goddamn about what it left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey."

"A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you'd make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little niche and make it your own. You ride out the time as best you can."

"The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own."

"I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it."

"He told me once that there is no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along - trying to wound his faith in order to test it - and I was just another stone in the way of his God."

"Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight."

"People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time - but even on the best day nobody's perfect."

"Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place."

"Sometimes we walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin."

"I miss journalism an awful lot."

"I won't be happy until I'm up there, receiving the Nobel Prize."

"A prize with money attached to it has a lot of prestige."

"I am hugely insecure and desperate to be loved and I want my reader to adore me, to a disturbing, stalkerish degree."

"I've been haunting bookshops and hiding behind display signs of TV chefs (Nigella is excellent to hide behind as she has a huge arse) as I spy on the short fiction section and see if anyone's tempted by my sweet bait. I've also been counting how many copies of the book are left in shops, and I've been covering other “upcoming” authors’ books with mine."

"Art is a hideously painful business, you know. Pity me! Or at least buy me a drink."

"I was kind of solitary. I'd spend a lot of time on my own, reading books. I didn't integrate very well."

"I called the boss a ‘fucker’ one day – not to his face, but it got back to him – so that was the end."

"I used to write in the Rathmines public library. I was on the dole and living in a bedsit down the road. It was too cold to write at home. I had one of those meters that you had to put 50p into. So I'd go down the library every morning and after lunch to scribble stuff in longhand in the study room there."

"I don't want to become the kind of writer who's putting out a book every two years. Money is not my primary concern. I've been broke before and I'll do it again."

"I think if you've got something to say and you can say it with less, that's the way to go."

"I meet people who tell me things like, ‘I read your book in two days’. Please don’t do that. These things take me years to write. Slow down. Everything you read, slow down. Reading is our great act of resistance in this age of speed and carelessness."

"I write to discover something, not so much to set down what I already know. I see ignorance and confusion all around me. I see these things in myself. I'm subject of all kinds of fears and conflicting desires. But one of those desires, the sanest one, is to see through the confusion."

"Tolstoy's War and Peace is overblown – do yourself a favour and read his Death of Ivan Ilych."

"The ‘novel’ is a publishing convention that deforms the story. If more attention were given to form there would be fewer novels and better stories. There's no reason a publisher can’t put out a story that's a hundred or even seventy pages long. But a publisher will look at a story like that as defective novel, ineligible for shortlists. It should be in a collection. Or pumped full of air, turned into a novel… It's a pity. You see some good writers behaving like performing monkeys."

"The real writers are tenacious creatures, and they found a way long before there were writers workshops and creative writing courses in the universities. In the absence of formal frameworks, personal initiatives and informal frameworks become more important."

"You always think that if you're going to spend seven years on a book, it should be Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses or something, but mine is just a 200-page book that took a long time."

"This is going to sound really childish, but I've been intrigued by Romania ever since the 1976 Olympics, when Nadia Comăneci, the little gymnast, scored a perfect 10. And I thought any country that gave that to the world had to be wonderful, so I read up a lot on it. When the 1989 revolutions broke out, I remember cheering them on. They were the last ones to make a bid for freedom, and it was the bloodiest and the most spectacular of the revolutions. It was almost French in its drama, like the French Revolution."

"I nearly went fucking crazy crazy. Notes [from a Coma] marked a sort of natural breakdown with Jonathan Cape. The book got a good critical response but it didn't too well. So publishers look at you then and think, okay, he writes good books but . . . If you have that experimental twist, you make things hard for yourself. So for those five years, I couldn't give my work away. It was tough on me and for people around me. But as my wife Maeve said to me, it isn't my job to get published . . . it is my job to write."

"I rang up this publisher and they asked me what I was doing at the time. I told them I was a house-painter, so first of all they had me come round and paint the place. Only later did they consider my work and Banished Misfortune was published."

"It is a costly thing living here to fight the erosion. The sea is constantly threatening to cut into the coastline and sweep all this away. Every year we have to haul stones up here to repair the damage and plug the holes. It's a full-time job."

"[Kafka] taught me a lot about the normal and the abnormal, and the distance between them. [...] He's out there by himself. You get the jump in the feet when you read certain passages by him. That's the mark of truly great writing. It gives you the jump in the feet."

"The Bible has entered much of my work as have Latin and Greek mythology and verse."

"I often find poems hand written in old abandoned notebooks."

"I'm always fascinated by etymology."

"I know writing is what I do but I still don't see myself as one."

"There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer – reading is so much a part of it."

"Without the reader there would be no writer."

"I'm no good at dinner parties. I feel very uneasy at them."

"I like the idea of stopping mid-sentence, like Graham Greene."

"The heir of Patrick Kavanagh"

"Ireland's finest living novelist"

"The writer's writer"

"A Celtic Hemingway"

"Probably the finest memoir … written in Ireland in the last 50 years"

"He plays a game of his own, where different rules apply, and yet he commands his place. When you read his work, you have to adjust the straight line of the hierarchy just to fit him in."

"There is something of the eternally mischievous child about Healy, though he approaches the art of writing with all the seriousness of a religious vocation."

"Does Ms Battersby look at the photograph of Dermot Healy and say: This is an old man's effort not fashionable like Neil Jordan's so I'll disembowel him because that's how I feel today? We were all privileged to read Ms Battersby's ghost story in The Irish Times Magazine a few months ago. It was a revelation. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it was the worst piece of creative writing I have ever read in a long life of reading. Truly. Stunningly bad. I have used it in a workshop as an example of how to avoid writing “Shite and onions”. That this person has the temerity to sit in negative judgment on one of the great masters of Irish writing should not pass without comment."

"I remember rocking the pram with one hand and typing with the other."

"There was a great buzz and sometimes I felt like awarding myself purple hearts for the work I was doing."

"It was lucky I was hanging around with theatre types who don't really have steady jobs."

"There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick."

"Everybody's got an opinion about her, haven't they? Even that charmless female Anne Enright couldn't just accept a fat cheque and the Man Booker Prize for her miserable novel about a large family without telling the world, totally gratuitously, that she hated Kate McCann. Her publishers should have put a large brown bag over her head immediately — because to put down someone who is guilty of no crime, except being fit and attractive, is thoroughly repellent. I urge you not to buy Enright's book until she apologises for this slur on another member of the sisterhood."

"She should, in my view, make a substantial donation to the Madeleine McCann fund -- perhaps half her Booker prizewinnings of €70,000: she will be a rich woman, in any case... But I doubt she will make any such gesture, because I don't think she quite understands how much damage she has done, not just to Mr and Mrs McCann, but to the vital principle that every individual in a properly-run democracy is innocent until proved guilty. She seems to think that the unfortunate aspect was the "timing" of the piece. No, it was not. It was the substance -- and the effect."

"I always say that a man with one language is like a man with one eye."

"They are angry men with vision, Brother, and by God their anger is justified. Ireland has not much longer to suffer. Her misery will soon be over and we'll be a united country again." "Yes," said Brother Sebastian, "but I don't like their methods." "Nor do I, Brother. Nor do I. But do you like the methods of the British Government any better?"

"There's not much money - if that's what you mean." "Approximately." "Once all the debts are paid there will be very little." "Nevertheless. Every little helps. The Brothers are sorely in need of it this weather."

"What we run here, Brother, is a finishing school for the sons of the Idle Poor." "It finishes them all right."

""Bitter?" said the barmaid and he nodded. What a strange thing to call a drink. Bitter. Aloes. Sorrow. For something that was supposed to make you feel happy."

"It's a bad day when the biggest thing you catch is a seagull."

"Michael wondered why it was the tragic things that remained with him most vividly."

"When they had come recruiting to his school - 'for fishers of men' - all those years ago and had offered the glittering lures of sanctity and safety, Michael had jumped selflessly. It was a long time before the line pulled taut and he felt the pain of the hooks within him and the irony of the fisherman caught."

"He no longer believed in any of it. Faith was a bit like luck. Spiritual luck. By the end of his novitiate it had begun to drain away. He struggled and prayed to retain it but each morning that he awoke he realized that he had less of it. He had sprung a leak and he didn't know where to mend it. Nevertheless he took his final vows. He did not know what else he could do. To back out at that stage would have killed his father. He was convinced of it. Once he had discussed the problem with his Novice Master but he had averted his face and told him to pray. After this his prayers carried an extra phrase - if You exist. God, if You exist, help me. But this compromise eventually gave way to not praying at all. He felt totally trapped. [...] It was funny in a way that it was his love for his father and a desire not to hurt him that kept him for so long in the Brothers. But when his father died everything changed."

"A bird's-eye view does not see the truth."

"If you have a war on your hands you send for the Mr Crillys of this world. The hard men and the bandits are the real revolutionaries, if you see what I mean. They get things done, they punch the hole for us to get through later."

"Suddenly a police Land Rover with its hee-haw siren blaring swung into the main road behind them with a squeal of tyres. It roared along and overtook them so fast its body tilted at an angle to the chassis. Someone said, "Jesus, they'll sell no ice cream going at that speed.""

"Do you still want to - refuse to help?" "I'm afraid so." "Not to act - you know - is to act. By not doing anything you are helping to keep the Brits here."

""Once you've been through a tragedy you're scared of it ever after," Mrs Morton said."

"He put his feet up on the mantelpiece and leaned back in the chair. He thought about how things happened to him but he brought nothing about. What he needed was self-discipline. His mother had ruled her own life with a hand of iron. She did everything she should do, getting up at seven and walking a mile to mass every day no matter what the weather; if she wanted one thing badly she did without others; if what she wanted was spiritual she denied her body. In Lent she took black tea and weighed her morsels of food on scales and for six weeks wouldn't let a sweet cross her lips although she loved them. She sent money abroad to her working sisters while at night she sat with a wooden mushroom darning her stockings with a criss-cross brown thread. She worked so her family would not want and Cal had never wanted while she was alive. He got a sense of a new life, a new start now that he had officially moved into the cottage. He would discipline himself. He felt a surge of his own power to direct his life into whatever path he wanted. There were six cigarettes left in his packet and he lit one and smoked it with a decadent pleasure, knowing it to be his last. The rest he threw into the fire."

"We went on a school trip down the Rhine one summer and I saw a crucifixion that made all others pale for me. It was a painting. And it was the first thing like that which had any effect on me. I stood and stared at it for so long the teachers lost me and had to come back for me."

"What about you?" "I would like to see a united Ireland, but I haven't decided the best way to go about it yet." "I feel sorry for it." "What?" "Ireland. It's like a child. It's only concerned with the past and the present. The future has ceased to exist for it."

"Violence is a bit like antibodies. Small doses build up until you can reject and be immune to the most horrific events."

"Love is a very strange idea. I never know what it is. When you were young it seemed to be all intensity and no opportunity. Later when you did get the opportunity the fire had gone out of it."

"Cal, the world is full of gulpins who don't care who they hurt."

"It was a way of not thinking - to concentrate on her surroundings. If she stared at things, then it helped block out stuff."

"Purring was the funniest thing, like a motorbike in the distance."

""The individual matters," said Mrs Gallagher."

"Are you a conduit for the music?"

"On a slippery slope the only way was down."

"An earthquake in one department created tidal waves in others."

"Steady as a three-legged stool."

"Sometimes I have difficulty with the avant-garde. There's a gallery in London I've been to and it's difficult to tell what's going on. A bag of nails, a ladder, a hammer - a crisp bag in the corner. Is it an exhibition or are they preparing an exhibition? Is the artist asking me to pay attention to something trivial or important?"

"She smiled to prove everything was all right. It was an odd device, this rearrangement of muscles of the face which said everything is all right. No need to enquire within. It could be used as a barrier to fend off emotional intruders."

"In a Portstewart guest house her father liked to play tricks when he had eaten his egg. He would put the shell upside down in someone else's eggcup. The McKennas would sit and watch the next person lift a spoon and cave in the top of the hollow egg."

"When she met men the first things she took account of were the negative things. Wimpishness, a bully, shiftiness, recklessness, elaborate facial hair."

"The island kids had TV, radio. Their remote surroundings were seen as a deprivation, not something to be enjoyed. They felt cut off from the mainstream. To be on an island was a source of discontent, not as good as the mainland."

"I wish I was artistic," said Liz, "then I could be temperamental."

"You sit down to your desk and listen to what's inside your head. Things appear suddenly and unexpectedly. I don't mean it's like inspiration or anything like that but, put it this way, you are there with a 3B pencil in your hand should you hear anything good. If you are in a notion of working, the idea takes root and won't let you go. It puts out twigs and branches. These twigs get leaves and thorns and maybe, if you are lucky, blossoms. And fruit. [...] The worst thing that can happen at a time like this is an interruption. When the interruption is over it's very hard to get the same momentum going again."

"How can something be utterly simple and amazingly complex at the same time? Things are simple or complex according to how much attention is paid to them."

"It's all going far too well," said Gerry. "A bad omen."

""Alcohol is the rubber tyres between me and the pier." He held up his glass to her. They chinked."

"She found a large and classy department store. Like any other city, Amsterdam was full of shops which sold things that nobody wanted. Or the kind of things some people wanted but nobody needed."

"Since Belfast, he always sat in a chair facing the door."

"Now that they had mobile phones, theoretically it should have been easier to keep tabs on one another. But practically it had not helped. In the first instance you had to remember to bring the bloody thing with you. If you had it with you, invariably one or other of the mobiles was switched off or needed charging. And then, even if you did get through, Stella's phone had some mysterious setting which diverted incoming calls straight to 'Leave a message'. And her phone did not ring. And she did not answer it."

"Look, see, behold. Above all, listen."

"He succeeded in persuading her back to look at The Jewish Bride. There was a crowd gathered around it. It was huge, big as a hoarding, a great slash of browns and yellows and reds. Two figures, a man and a woman on the edge of intimacy, or perhaps just after, about to coorie in to one another. Hands. Hands everywhere. A painting about touch. Stella joined the crowd and wormed her way to the front. Gerry watched her bite her lip as she gazed. She became aware of Gerry watching her. He excused himself and threaded his way to her side. "Well?" "There's a great tenderness in him," she said. "You can see he cherishes her." "Look at that big hand of his," Gerry said. "And the sleeve. Like a big croissant. The way he's put the paint on." "And the faces," she said. "But she's not so sure. Shy, yes. Sure, no. What sumptuous clothes." She pointed out the groom's hand around the woman's shoulder and his other hand resting on her breast. The bride's touch of the groom's hand."

"She rummaged in her bag and produced a postcard she'd bought in the museum shop. Old Woman Reading. It was not the painting she had seen but a different one. When she'd asked for the postcard the assistant had shrugged and said they were out of it. There are many old women reading, she said. The assistant had offered her another, even better, card. An old woman, cowled in some dark material, looking down at a book. It was so lovely - the concentration in the eyes, the luminescence of the ancient face reflected from the page, the interior light from reading whatever was printed there."

"When they finally got into the foyer there were some enlarged black and white photographs. Anne in her school playground before the war. Anne in the street with friends. Anne at a desk, writing."

"They crossed a metal suspension bridge over a canal. Both sides of the structure bristled with padlocks. Some of the brass locks had felt-tipped names written on them. 'Don + Gwen', 'Micky & Minnie', 'Leo n Leonora'. One had a message written on it. 'Graham and Vickey. I love you more than Coco Pops.' "It must be some kind of love fest," Gerry said. "Clamped for ever." "Have you seen this kinda thing before?" "I've heard of it." "It'll be the young ones." "Trendy ones.""

"A thing that really took his breath away was Norman Foster's roof over the Great Court at the British Museum - the audacity and brilliance of it. The approach inside the building from a periphery of darkness into the thrilling light at its centre - the largest covered square in Europe - was utterly wonderful."

"Stella was telling the clerk that there was a Catholic church in the heart of the red-light district called 'Our Dear Lord in the Attic'. "Would there be Mass there?" "No, I do not think so." The clerk shook his head. "It is now a museum." "All religion should be in museums," Gerry said."

"The coffee was good and the first sip made him want a cigarette. His hand went to his pocket before he realised it was decades since he'd had a smoke. The desire came out of nowhere. He thought how foolish, how stuck in routine the body becomes. Would the same thing happen if he tried to give up drinking?"

"On the wall above the sink was a board, with tools clipped to it. A hammer, screwdrivers - a pair of pliers, a hacksaw. And other stuff. Each item was outlined carefully in red paint. "I like your board arrangement," said Stella. "It's to remind me to put things back. If I don't, the empty ghost yells at me. So I put things back.""

"You know how vivid things are in extremis. There's something going on in the brain. Chemicals. They make the moment indelible.""

"Stella found herself isolating one particular snowflake - a small one - and watching its progress. Lifting, floating, eddying upwards, sinking among the others. Dithering. Then when it went off her radar she would choose another and watch it and will it to survive for as long as possible."

"What happened to you? You're nothing but appetite."

"He wanted to pray but couldn't because he no longer believed. Prayer was just an intense wishing."

"Believers. I mean, where have they all gone?"

"Gerry had once said to her in the middle of an argument that he didn't believe in souls but if, just perchance, they did exist, hers would be like a razor. She had been made that way by the Catholic Church, he said. Inflexible, narrow, capable of doing terrible damage by her adherence to rules and systems. But she totally objected. She told him that if she was a good person at all, it had come from her religion. If she had any sense of justice and fairness, any concept of equality, then it had come from the Church."

"When she emptied the kettle she always filled it for the benefit of the next person."

"There's nobody can fix this but yourself. You are the only one who can make the changes."

""Four pounds?" Still the woman hesitated. "Any less and it'd be a favour," he said. Already he was out of pocket. He stood up to end the bargaining."

"A summer insect flew into the metal dome of the Anglepoise and knocked around like a tiny knuckle."

"On the wall above the desk was an ikon he had bought in Thessaloníki - he afterwards discovered that he had paid too much for it. It had been hanging for some months before he noticed, his attention focused by a moment of rare idleness, that Christ had a woodworm hole in the pupil of his left eye. It was inconspicuous by its position, and rather than detracting from the impact, he felt the ikon was enhanced by the authenticity of this small defect."

"Sit down, son, don't loom."

"It concentrates the mind wonderfully knowing that this [life] is all we can expect."

"I come from the kind of house where if my father saw me with a book in my hand he'd say, "Can you not find something better to do?""

"Neil offered his arm as she lowered herself from the step to the ground. "What a polite young man." "That's my mother's fault.""

"It is disconcerting to find that an acquaintance considers you his best friend, his soul mate, but I could do nothing about it."

""But listen to this," Kathleen laughed and wheezed. "We had been talking about books. He tells me he reads a lot - as a matter of fact he's book mad - and when I came in with the tea I said 'Do you like Earl Grey?' and he says, 'I don't know. What did he write?' Isn't that marvellous?" Mary smiled and nodded while Kathleen giggled uncontrollably."

"He continued talking. "When you find out about real education you can never leave it alone. I don't mean A-levels and things like that - you are just proving something to yourself with them - but books, ideas, feelings. Everything to do with up here." He tapped his temple. "And here." He tapped the middle of his chest."

"INTERVIEWER: (After an awkward silence) And how do you see the future? PROFUNDO: I wait for it to come and then look at it (laughs)."

"You can't choose your children."

"There's not much you can do in this world without people getting to know."

"Right wise it was of our Colm when founding in Iona his famous sixth century school and colony of monks and scholars, he forbade the bringing in of a cow. "Where comes a cow," the wise man laid down, "there follows a woman; and where comes a woman follows trouble.""