It was one of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life to feel that I was no longer a boy. From that moment I began to grow ...old in my own esteem--and in my esteem age is not estimable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whenever I hear about a child needing something, I ask myself, 'Is it what he needs or what he wants?' It isn't always easy to dis...tinguish between the two. A child has many real needs which can and should be satisfied. His wants are a bottomless pit. He wants, for example, to sleep with his parents. He needs to be in his own bed. At Christmas he wants every toy advertised on television. He needs only one or two.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No one to blame!... That was why most people led lives they hated, with people they hated.... How wonderful to have someone to bla...me! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right. You may be fragmented, but you feel absolved of all the blame for it. Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and inte...llectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality.... No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you believe in your own sex, and won't have it done dirt to: they'll down you. It's the one insane taboo left: sex as a natural... and vital thing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For sex, to me, means the whole of the relationship between man and woman. Now this relationship is far greater than we know. We o...nly know a few crude forms--mistress, wife, mother, sweetheart. The woman is like an idol, or a marionette, always forced to play one role or another.... If only we could break up this fixity, and realize ... that a woman is a flow, a river of life, quite different from a man's river of life: and that each river must flow in its own way, though without breaking its bounds: and that the relation of man to woman is the flowing of two rivers side by side, sometimes mingling, then separating again, and travelling on. The relationship is a life-long change and a life-long travelling.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And when the festival was over, that was the end of it all. And I do not think I am being fanciful when I say that this was at lea...st partly because it had already taken place--but elsewhere. After all, this story of Al*Ith has taught us all that what goes on in one Zone affects the others, even when we believe we are hostile, or forget everything that goes on outside our own borders. We share and exchange our times of sluggishness, insularity, self- applause. When those women stove and struggled to lift their poor heads up so they could see our mountain towering over them it was as if they were secretly pouring energy and effort into springs that fed us all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time... for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean--when boredom seems the very stuff of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which is bot...h natural and supernatural--understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »