But surely love wouldn’t get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
Solitary and farouche people don’t have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.
No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
Education is not so important as people think.
When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature’s penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.
Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland...
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.
On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else’s do.
Dialogue should show the relationships among people.
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
Disappointment tears the bearable film of life.
After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say “Oh look!” Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.
You could see that her tremendous inside life, its solitary fears and fires, was out of accord with her humble view of herself; to hide or excuse what she felt was her first wish.
People must hope so much when they tear streets up and fight at barricades. But, whoever wins, the streets are laid again and the trams start running again. One hopes too much of destroying things. If revolutions do not fail, they fail you.
Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.
She was in that flagging mood when to go on living seems only to load more unmeaning moments on to your memory.
The belt slid down her thin hips, and she nervously gripped at it, pulling it up. Short sleeves showed her very thin arms and big delicate elbow joints. Her body was all concave and jerkily fluid lines; it moved with sensitive looseness, loosely threaded together: each movement had a touch of exaggeration, as though some secret power kept springing out.