Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.

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.

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.

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.

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.