we can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height.

The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.

Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.

...though one can be callous in Ireland one cannot be wholly opaque or material. An unearthly disturbance works in the spirit; reason can never reconcile one to life; nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.

somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.