Faolain Quotes

#1. Did anyone ever hear of an intelligent fantasy?

Nuala O'Faolain

#2. They're fathers second, Jimmy said. They're men first.

Nuala O'Faolain

#3. When I stay with the couple who are my closest friends, I hear them laughing and talking in bed, and sometimes in the middle of the night one of them goes down and makes tea, and when the clock goes off in the morning, they start again, talking to each other.

Nuala O'Faolain

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

Sean O'Faolain

#5. 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.

Sean O'Faolain

#6. When I was young, I learned to feel for the harshness under every soft appearance.

Nuala O'Faolain

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

Sean O Faolain

#8. In the presence of great music we have no alternative but to live nobly.

Sean O Faolain

#9. In any case, I would prefer to read something I don't enjoy than do almost anything else. I like the act of reading itself. Following the line of something - not just the story but the rhythm, the tone, the feel of what has accumulated from before and what is beginning to impend ...

Nuala O'Faolain

#10. Though it seemed trivial, now, to describe a place as if what is was, was what I could see of it.

Nuala O'Faolain

#11. If there were nothing else, reading would
obviously
be worth living for.

Nuala O'Faolain

#12. 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.

Sean O'Faolain

#13. Hough silence must add intensity to your intimate moments, it must also shrivel your soul to lie beside someone who doesn't talk to you.

Nuala O'Faolain

#14. What makes a woman into a doormat? What makes her see some quite ordinary other person as a looming Goliath? And are not these relationships such an outrage to reality that they cannot last a lifetime?

Nuala O'Faolain

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

Sean O'Faolain

#16. Lovers are allowed to be as cruel as anything to the one who dissappoints them.

Nuala O'Faolain

#17. Do the thing that's less passive. Do the active thing. There's more of the human in that.

Nuala O'Faolain

#18. I have always felt that everybody on earth goes about in disguise.

Sean O Faolain

#19. I did believe, from my experience of life and of looking at the world, that men hated women.

Nuala O'Faolain

#20. ...friendship is something you do.

Nuala O'Faolain

#21. Love lives in sealed bottles of regret.

Sean O Faolain

#22. My life burned inside me. Even such as it was, it was the only record of me, and it was my only creation, and something in me would not accept that it was insignificant.

Nuala O'Faolain

#23. Stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.

Sean O Faolain

#24. There was nothing between the man and me - - nothing, not even liking. But because of the memory of some wholeness, or the hope of some regeneration, I would have dropped whatever I'd planned, just to go back to scratching around on his bed.

Nuala O'Faolain

#25. But this upland pass was the right place for remembering how, when I was young, I learned to feel for the harshness underneath every soft appearance.

Nuala O'Faolain

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

Sean O'Faolain

#27. The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.

Sean O Faolain

#28. Time is the third party to every relationship.

Nuala O'Faolain

#29. A bugler sounded the Last Post. Heartbreak made audible.

Nuala O'Faolain

#30. If we turn to early Irish literature, as we naturally may, to see what sort of people the Irish were in the infancy of the race, we find ourselves wandering in delighted bewilderment through a darkness shot with lightning and purple flame.

Sean O Faolain

#31. Permanence, I once copied down from a magazine, is what we all want when we can love and can be loved; change is what we want when we cannot.

Nuala O'Faolain

#32. The wait is long, my dream of you does not end.

Nuala O'Faolain

#33. The framework of the artist's ideas is clearly only that which he is forever seeking for universality, and must be far wider than the framework of the ideals of the patriot.

Sean O Faolain