"When, like the rising day, Eileen Aroon! Love sends his early ray, Eileen Aroon! What makes his dawning glow Changeless through joy and woe? Only the constant know!— Eileen Aroon!"

"A place in thy memory, dearest, Is all that I claim; To pause and look back when thou hearest The sound of my name."

"The image," says C. Day-Lewis in The Poetic Image, "is a method of asserting or reasserting spiritual control over the material." And he makes a very suggestive definition of what the critics have called "pure poetry" as "poetry whose meaning is deliberately concentrated within its images."

"Day-Lewis was a handsome man, in dress something of a dandy (in the best sense) and with a similar taste in such things as motor cars. In first coming into a room he might give the impression of austerity , but quite soon the mask would relax into its attractive lines of humour. He was, in fact, no mean anecdotalist, often against himself, at one time he had an hilarious story of catching his own dental plate before it could fly into the stalls after an impassioned end to a poetry reading."

"Who will say farewell? The beating bell. Will anyone miss me? That I dare not tell — Quick, Rose, and kiss me."

"So feast your eyes now On mimic star and moon-cold bauble: Worlds may wither unseen, But the Christmas Tree is a tree of fable, A phoenix in evergreen"

"Shall I be gone long? For ever and a day To whom there belong? Ask the stone to say Ask my song."

"I have had worse partings, but none that so Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly Saying what God alone could perfectly show — How selfhood begins with a walking away, And love is proved in the letting go."

"Is it birthday weather for you, dear soul? Is it fine your way"

"They who in folly or mere greed Enslaved religion, markets, laws, Borrow our language now and bid Us to speak up in freedom's cause."

"It's hard to believe a spirit could die Of such generous glow"

"Tempt me no more, for I Have known the lightning's hour, The poet's inward pride, The certainty of power."

"I am absolutely sure Cecil’s poetry is underrated. He persists in the mind."

"It is the logic of our times, No subject for immortal verse— That we who lived by honest dreams Defend the bad against the worse."

"Nigel's six feet sprawled all over the place; his gestures were nervous and little uncouth; a lock of sandy coloured hair dropping over his forehead, and the deceptive naïveté of his face in repose gave him a resemblance to an overgrown prep. schoolboy. His eyes were the same blue as his uncle's, but shortsighted and noncommittal. Yet there was an underlying similarity between the two. A latent, sardonic humor in their conversation, a friendliness and simple generosity in their smiles, and that impression of energy in reserve which is always given by those who possess an abundance of life directed towards consciously-realised aims."

"Do not expect again the phoenix hour, The triple-towered sky, the dove's complaining, Sudden the rain of gold and heart's first ease Traced under trees by the eldritch light of sundown."

"I have found the one great man in these lands - his name is Cecil Day-Lewis."

"Put out the lights now! Look at the Tree, the rough tree dazzled In oriole plumes of flame, Tinselled with twinkling frost fire, tasselled With stars and moons"

"In an orchard there should be enough to eat, enough to lay up, enough to be stolen, and enough to rot on the ground."

"Words are men’s daughters, but God’s sons are things."

"Some write their wrongs in marble: he more just, Stoop’d down serene and wrote them in the dust,— Trod under foot, the sport of every wind, Swept from the earth and blotted from his mind. There, secret in the grave, he bade them lie, And grieved they could not ’scape the Almighty eye."

"They who see the Flying Dutchman never, never reach the shore."

"Doubt is brother-devil to Despair."

"The world is large when weary leagues two loving hearts divide But the world is small when your enemy is loose on the other side."

"Though it lash the shallows that line the beach, Afar from the great sea-deeps, There is never a storm whose might can reach Where the vast leviathan sleeps. Like a mighty thought in a mighty mind In the clear cold depths he swims; Whilst above him the pettiest form of his kind With a dash o'er the surface skims."

"I'd rather live in Bohemia than in any other land."

"For all time to come, the freedom and purity of the press are the test of national virtue and independence. No writer for the press, however humble, is free from the burden of keeping his purpose high and his integrity white."

"The red rose whispers of passion, And the white rose breathes of love; O, the red rose is a falcon, And the white rose is a dove.But I send you a cream-white rosebud With a flush on its petal tips, For the love that is purest and sweetest Has a kiss of desire on the lips."

"You gave me the key of your heart, my love; Then why did you make me knock? Oh that was yesterday, saints above! And last night—I changed the lock!"

"How shall I a habit break? As you did that habit make. As you gathered, you must lose; As you yielded, now refuse. Thread by thread the strands we twist Till they bind us, neck and wrist. Thread by thread the patient hand Must untwine, ere free we stand. As we builded, stone by stoene, We must toil, unhelped, alone, Till the wall is overthrown."

"The organized charity, scrimped and iced, In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ."

"Be silent and safe—silence never betrays you."

"Is it life? I would rather be without it, for there is quare small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night's porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed jars and foreign bacon. Many a man has spent a hundred years trying to get the dimensions of it and when he understands it at last and entertains the certain pattern of it in his head, be the hokey he takes to his bed and dies. He dies like a poisoned sheepdog. There is nothing so dangerous you can't smoke it, nobody will give you tuppence halfpenny for the half of it, and it kills you in the wind-up. It is a quare contraption, very dangerous, a certain death-trap."

"Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill."

"The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at a crossroads."

"If Irish were to die completely, the standard of English here, both in the spoken and written word, would sink to a level probably as low as that obtaining in England and it would stop there only because it could go no lower."

"It cannot be too often repeated that I am not for sale. I was bought in 1921 and the transaction was final and conclusive."

"Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country."

"You told me what the first rule of wisdom is," I said. "What is the second rule?" "That can be answered," he said. "There are five in all. Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first...If you follow them," said the Sergeant, "you will save your soul and you will never get a fall on a slippy road."

"You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?"

"Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand."

"Often in the theatre I can hardly hear myself talking or assuring my doxy that so-and-so is the same fellow that played so-and-so in so-and-so, he's very good, he's a civil servant in the Department of Agriculture, I met a sister of his in Skerries, and so on. Actors should conduct themselves like the rest of us and practise the unobtrusive intonation of the gentleman."

"The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles."

"Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places."

""When things go wrong and will not come right,"

""Who is Fox?", I asked."

"Some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their houses."

"Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder."

"One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings."

"After a time," said old Mathers disregarding me, "I mercifully perceived the errors of my ways and the unhappy destination I would reach unless I mended them. I retired from the world in order to try to comprehend it and to find out why it becomes more unsavoury as the years accumulate on a man's body. What do you think I discovered at the end of my meditations?"