I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

An intellectual hate is the worst.

Hammer your thoughts into unity.

If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf

I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.