I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

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

... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

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.

... 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.

What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.