You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
All the rare and royal names Wormy sheepskin yet retains
There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.
Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life.
When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servent girls in the kitchen.
A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.
In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest -- usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation -- and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.
Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.
Don't be afraid to fail. Anything that I've ever attempted I was always willing to fail. You can't always win, but don't be afraid of making decisions.
Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
It's not that easy to find someone I can relate too. I'm tough to crack because I'm shy.