Nuala O'Faolain Quotes

Time is the third party to every relationship.

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

A bugler sounded the Last Post. Heartbreak made audible.

Friendship is something you do.

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

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

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

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

What is not challenged from outside is open to corruption from within. -This is the infinite value of a dissenting voice: that where it is not allowed to flourish, an institution- a school or an orpha...

States have no goodness. They suppress these villains here and promote those villains there, with no aim but self-aggrandizement.

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

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

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.

I tried not to think about it. But every so often it would burst out of me - why did he do something so unkind? What had I done to deserve it? I did believe, from my experience of life and of looking...

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.

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.

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 ton...

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

Did anyone ever hear of an intelligent fantasy?

But you know, there's one simple thing I see absolutely clearly, now that I am so very old.I looked at her. The Albert Einstein hairstyle, and the bright black eyes and the sharp nose. That pallor on...