A Kerry footballer with an inferiority complex is one who thinks he's just as good as everybody else.
Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.
Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don't just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity. The printed page becomes a kind of wrought-iron fence we crawl through, returning, once we have wandered, to the very place we started.
What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.
A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.
I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word.
If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents.
Tea is nought but this: first you heat the water, then you make the tea. Then you drink it properly. That is all you need to know.
Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?
What seems new is only new to us.
Ritual which could entail a wedding or brushing one's teeth goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed solitude with rushing, irreducible conditions of life.