It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.

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

The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.

Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.

With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.