It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.

It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish.

My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.

A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful thought conceived in an instant: non serviam: I will not serve. That instant was his [Lucifer's] ruin.