I Used To Take Five Or Six

...with A Rush Of Feeling He Felt That This Must Be Happiness. As Soon As The Thought Came To Him, He Fought It Back, Blaming The Whiskey. The Very Idea Was As Dangerous As Presumptive Speech: Happiness Could Not Be Sought Or Worried Into Being, Or Even Fully Grasped; It Should Be Allowed Its Own Slow Pace So That It Passes Unnoticed, If It Ever Comes At All.

We Absolutely Believed In Heaven And Hell, Purgatory, And Even Limbo. I Mean, They Were Actually Closer To Us Than Australia Or Canada, That They Were Real Places.

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.

I Think There's A Great Difference In Consciousness In That Same Way In That When We're Young We Read Books For The Story, For The Excitement Of The Story - And There Comes A Time When You Realise That All Stories Are More Or Less The Same Story.

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.