Nuala O'Faolain

“...time is the third party to every relationship.”

— 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…

— Nuala O'Faolain

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

— Nuala O'Faolain

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

— 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

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

— Nuala O'Faolain

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

— Nuala O'Faolain

“...when I was young, I learned to feel for the harshness under every soft appearance.”

— Nuala O'Faolain

“I tried not to think about it. But every so often it would burst out of me - why did he do…

— Nuala O'Faolain

My life burned inside me. Even such as it was, it was the only record of me, and it was my only…

— Nuala O'Faolain

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

— Nuala O'Faolain

“There was nothing between the man and me - - nothing, not even liking. But because of the memory of some wholeness,…

— 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…

— Nuala O'Faolain

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

— Nuala 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.…

— Nuala O'Faolain

A bugler sounded the Last Post. Heartbreak made audible.

— Nuala O'Faolain

“But this upland pass was the right place for remembering how, when I was young, I learned to feel for the harshness…

— 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…

— Nuala O'Faolain

“The world is wonderful, she said. All its little things. It is wonderful.”

— Nuala O'Faolain

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

— Nuala O'Faolain

Did anyone ever hear of an intelligent fantasy?

— Nuala O'Faolain

Let me just say that I am not often lonely in country places. In cities I am, like the writers of the…

— Nuala O'Faolain

“Permanence, I once copied down from a magazine, is what we all want when we can love and can be loved; change…

— Nuala O'Faolain

“What is not challenged from outside is open to corruption from within. -This is the infinite value of a dissenting voice: that…

— Nuala O'Faolain

...friendship is something you do.

— Nuala O'Faolain