All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.

But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.

The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

very young people are true but not resounding instruments.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

...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.

Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.