Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.

... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.

...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.