Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially.

Natural life, lived naturally as it is lived in the countryside, has none of that progress which is the base of happiness. Men and women in rural communities can be compared to a spring that rises out of a rock and spreads in irregular ever-widening circles. But the general principle is static.

How strange a thing like that happens to a man. He dabbles in something and does not realise that it is his life.

Young writers should keep out of pubs and remember that the cliche way of the artistic life is a lie.

That was the impressive thing, that Joe took to the first team like a duck to water,

Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply.