Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?

Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.

What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

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.

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

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