War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.

There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war.

The sweet air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish.

All are / naked, none is safe.

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

When we think we don't like art it is because it is artificial art.

I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish.

I believe verbal felicity is the fruit of ardor, of diligence, and of refusing to be false.

Unconfusion submits its confusion to proof; it's not a Herod's oath that cannot change.

The sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.

The mind is an enchanting thing.

Only imagination that towers can reproduce evanescence and render rigidity flexible.

The mind is an enchanting thing is an enchanted thing, like the glaze on a katydid-wing subdivided by sun till the nettings are legion.

As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one's attending upon you; but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.

What is our innocence, What is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe.

Among animals, one has a sense of humor. Humor saves a few steps, it saves years.

As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.

Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?

[The] whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so much confusion.

To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it.

Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people.

I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Wolf's wool is the best of wool, / but it cannot be sheared because / the wolf will not comply.

Hindered characters / seldom have mothers / in Irish stories, but they all have grandmothers.