Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Mercifully one forgets one’s love affairs as one forgets one’s dreams.
I think being a woman is like being Irish… Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
It was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and devoid of reason. Their senselessness had never so much impressed me.
there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitted traitor, the one destined for judgment.
I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who’s a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way.
But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.
One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.
It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.
Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.
Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You’re like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.
That’s how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that’s how bloody awful it is being Irish!
Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat–”Bats have radar. Yours doesn’t seem to be working.
Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.
But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.
We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.
Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child.
God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
We are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return.
As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.
The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.
One doesn’t have to get anywhere in a marriage. It’s not a public conveyance.
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.