one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.

The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined.

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.

... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of trance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.