“Your mind will give back exactly what you put into it.”

“I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description”

“God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear.”

“It was hard work-a hard life-but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.”

“Oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.”

“For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”

“ere the hour of the twattering of bards in the twitterlitter between Druidia and the Deepsleep Sea”

“Deal with him, Hemingway!”

“It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that.”

“That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.”

“Beauty: it curves, curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires.”

“His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth.”

“We'll meet again, we'll part once more.”

“I care not if I live but a day and a night, so long as my deeds live after me.”

“over the bowls of memory where every hollow holds a hallow”

“no more pain. wake no more. nobody owns”

“White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquified beefsteak.”

“Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude...”

“And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.”

“The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.”

“History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.”

“There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin.”

“He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: A day of dappled seaborne clouds.”

“I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.”