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.

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

very young people are true but not resounding instruments.

When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos - as it does for a dog.

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.