Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.
The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.
A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.