As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.

All I know is a door into the dark

I shall gain glory or die.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.