“Trellis wants his salutary book to be read by all. He realizes that purely a moralizing tract would not reach the public. Therefore he is putting plenty of smut into his book.”

“Who is Fox?", I asked."Policeman Fox is the third of us," said the Sergeant, "but we never see him or hear tell of him at because he is always on his beat and never off it and he signs the book in the middle of the night when even a badger is asleep. He is as mad as a hare, he never interrogates the public and he is always taking notes.”

“I would not hurt you, little man,' he said.'I think that I got the disorder in Mullingar,' I explained. I knew that I had gained his confidence and that the danger of violence was now passed. He then did something which took me by surprise. He pulled up his own ragged trouser and showed me his own left leg. It was smooth, shapely and fairly fat but it was made of wood also.'That is a funny coincidence,' I said. I now perceived the reason for his sudden change of attitude.'You are a sweet man,' he responded, 'and I would not lay a finger on your personality. I am the captain of all the one-legged men in the country. I knew them all up to now except one—your own self—and that one is now also my friend into the same bargain. If any man looks at you sideways, I will rip his belly.''That is very friendly talk,' I said.'Wide open,' he said, making a wide movement with his hands. 'If you are ever troubled, send for me and I will save you from the woman.''Women I have no interest in at all,' I said smiling. 'A fiddle is a better thing for diversion.''It does not matter. If your perplexity is an army or a dog, I will come with all the one-leggèd men and rip the bellies. My real name is Martin Finnucane.''It is a reasonable name,' I assented.'Martin Finnucane,' he repeated, listening to his own voice as if he were listening to the sweetest music in the world.”

“When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.”

“If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflection, what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man”

“This benign property of his prose is not, one hopes, to be attributed to the reason noticed by the eccentric du Garbandier, who said 'the beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the happy conviction that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greatest'.”

“Tell me, ' he continued, 'would it be true that you are an itinerant dentist and that you came on a tricycle?''It would not, ' I replied.'On a patent tandem?''No.'[...]'Then maybe you are no ...dentist at all, ' he said, 'but only a man after a dog licence or papers for a bull?''I did not say I was a dentist, ' I said sharply, 'and I did not say anything about a bull.”