At the edge of the still, dark pool that was the sea, at the brimming edge of freedom where no boat was to be seen, she spoke the first words of the few they were...

Think for yourselves for a change. You’ve been pedlars: go and be merchants. You’ve been mercenaries: go and find something of your own to defend. You’ve finished teething and there’s the world: crack it open...

And habits are hell’s own substitute for good intentions. Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative , of imagination. They’re the curse of marriage and the after-bane of death.

For an hour, blended with all she could offer, something noble had been created which had nothing to do with the physical world. And from the turn of his throat, the warmth of his hair,...

But I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.

I don’t like this war. I don’t like the cold-blooded scheming at the beginning and the carnage at the end and the grumbling and the jealousies and the pettishness in the middle. I hate the...

You might, without my crediting it, fall deeply in love and forever, with some warped hunchback whelped in the gutter. I should equally stop you from taking him.

My dear boy, in Ireland the midwife uses one hand to hold the baby’s best fighting arm from the font water, and grips its jaws with the other lest the goes to litigation about it....

I would give you my soul in a blackberry pie; and a knife to cut it with.

And across the water, you would swear you could sniff it all; the cinnamon and the cloves, the frankincense and the honey and the licorice, the nutmeg and citrons, the myrrh and the rosewater from...