There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.

I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

There is no topicmore soporific and generally boring than the topic of Ireland as Ireland, as a nation.

The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hand.