One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Elizabeth Bowen
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
We are minor in everything but our passions.
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.
I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
Education is not so important as people think.
