Quotes from Sean O'Faolain

Celibacy bestows on a man the qualified freedom of a besieged city where one sometimes has to eat rats.

Pessimists are usually kind. The gay, bubbling over, have to time for the pitiful.

The Irish 'peasant' is the child of time. He is its guardian and its slave. He will preserve for centuries dull and foolish habits that those who neither love nor fear time or change will quickly cast aside; but he will also preserve dear, ancient habits that like wine and ivory grow more beautiful and precious with age, all jumbled with the useless lumber in that dusty cockloft which is his ancestral mind.

At Harvard I learned most uncomfortably that facts are facts. In Italy I learned that facts are the way you look at them.

the modern writer's aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole.

My final thought now is that as in religion and the arts, so in politics; if men do not balance their feelings and intelligence they lose command of both - and worse still, of their object.

There is only one admirable form of the imagination the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.

An Irish queer: a fellow who prefers women to drink.