Faolain Quotes & Sayings

They're fathers second, Jimmy said. They're men first. — Nuala O'Faolain

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 at the world, that men hated women. But there were all kinds of exceptions, and I'd have bet everything that this man didn't hate me, this woman. — Nuala O'Faolain

I did believe, from my experience of life and of looking at the world, that men hated women. — Nuala O'Faolain

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry. — Sean O Faolain

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

Novels are completed when they are finished, but the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written ... I was not at all the same person, when I handed the manuscript to the publisher, as I had been when I began. A memoir may always be retrospective, but the past is not where its action takes place. — Nuala O'Faolain

...friendship is something you do. — Nuala O'Faolain

A bugler sounded the Last Post. Heartbreak made audible. — Nuala O'Faolain

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

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

Lovers are allowed to be as cruel as anything to the one who dissappoints them. — Nuala O'Faolain

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

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

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

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

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

Let me just say that I am not often lonely in country places. In cities I am, like the writers of the letters. Nature doesn't break your heart: other people do. Yet, we cannot live apart from each other in bowers feeding on nectar. We're in this together, this getting through our lives, as the fact that we are word-users shows. — Nuala O'Faolain

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

Stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask. — Sean O Faolain

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

Did anyone ever hear of an intelligent fantasy? — Nuala O'Faolain

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

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

Pessimists are usually kind. The gay, bubbling over, have to time for the pitiful. — Sean O'Faolain

When I was young, I learned to feel for the harshness under every soft appearance. — Nuala O'Faolain

If there were nothing else, reading would
obviously
be worth living for. — Nuala O'Faolain

The wait is long, my dream of you does not end. — Nuala O'Faolain

In the presence of great music we have no alternative but to live nobly. — Sean O Faolain

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

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 her face.
She put her small hand on mine.
The world is wonderful, she said. All its little things. It is wonderful. — Nuala O'Faolain

I have always felt that everybody on earth goes about in disguise. — Sean O Faolain

Do the thing that's less passive. Do the active thing. There's more of the human in that.
— Nuala O'Faolain

Time is the third party to every relationship. — Nuala O'Faolain

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

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

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

Love lives in sealed bottles of regret. — Sean O Faolain