Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

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

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

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

...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.

She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips.