The Irish say your trouble is their trouble and your joy their joy? I wish I could believe it; I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.

One must be as clear as one's natural reticence allows one to be.

[On her use of quotations:] When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence my writing, is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber.

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.

Wolf's wool is the best of wool, / but it cannot be sheared because / the wolf will not comply.

There never was a war that was not inward.

I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.