I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.

Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth.

Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country. It is being at odds withother nationalities, having quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death. At least it does not leave one pusillanimous.

Movie people are possessed by demons, but a very low form of demons.

IT WAS TESS who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We'd been school friends. We'd picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn.

It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.

Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment.