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"It takes all sorts of people to make a world, as I've often heard, but I think there are some who could be spared,' Anne told her reflection in the east gable mirror that night."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Most peoples are prisoners of other people's thoughts."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Your water is in the bottles, and my water is in the bucket, but we are brothers? I am collecting garbage, and you are in the bed, but we are sisters? My fingers are broken, and your hands are so soft, but we are family? Your God is like an angel, and my God is like an evil, but we are equal? My stomach is empty, and your stomach is so big, but we are humans?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"PLEASE and THANK YOU...two polite phrases which are slowly disappearing from our vocabulary."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is ever so much easier to be good if your clothes are fashionable."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Women who don't like the rules change the rules."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Large families are communities unto their own."
Author Name
Personal Development
"People are very busy; they are so busy that when they walk in the crowds they see no one, no one but themselves; they hear no voice, no voice but their own voice!"
Author Name
Personal Development
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"When I was in my 20s it did occur to me that there was something perverted about an attitude that thought that killing somebody was a minor offence compared to kissing somebody."
Attitude
"For example, it's only about 20 years ago the people in that community would have got telephone lines, and it would be only about in the 1950s that electricity came to that part of the world. Television wouldn't have come till 1970."
People
"I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy."
Time
"I think it's linked to the realisation that we're not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story."
Language
"Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century."
Society
"I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world."
Difference
"Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity."
Cultural
"I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television."
Advice
"But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader."
World
"Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners."
People
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