Richard Ellmann

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning.

Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

Shut your eyes and see.

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

Love loves to love love.

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.