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.

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

Style, personality - deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers.

Florence Farr once said to me, If we could say to ourselves, with sincerity, 'this passing moment is as good as any I shall ever know,' we could die upon the instant and be united with God.

Before me floats an image, man or shade, / Shade more than man, more image than a shade.

We are fastened to a dying animal.

The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world no longer a dream.