rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.

Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.

The Irish landowner, partly from laziness but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round. Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland, but these cannot operate the whole time: on the whole, the landowner leaves his tenants and work-people to make their own mistakes, while he makes his.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

Makes of men date, like makes of car.

Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.