48 quotes found
Writer · Irish · 1899–1973
Irish writer (1899-1973)
“No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.”
“Silences have a climax when you have got to speak.”
“One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.”
“If you look at life one way there is always cause for alarm.”
“A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.”
“Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.”
“If they should only be ill,' she said, 'there would be so many little things we could do for them. It does seem in a kind of a way an opportunity. I often think it is only when a man is ill that he...”
“Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't ...”
“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 h...”
“And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in th...”
“She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.”
“The way one is envisaged by other people - what easier way is there of envisaging oneself? There is a fatalism in one's acceptance of it. Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice - ...”
“I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and that it's the knockings and baterrings we sometimes hear in each oth...”
“One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their...”
“Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.”
“He specialized in a particular kind of friendship with that eight-limbed, inscrutable, treacherous creature, the happily married coupe, adapting himself closely and lightly to the composite persona...”
“When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.”
“Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.”
“Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.”
“Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.”
“Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.”
“Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.”
“Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates it's own objects: is this not also true of fear?”
