The Viaduct Murder

that an Irishman is incapable of saying yes or no to a plain question? If you say, Has the rain stopped, he won’t say Yes, or No; he’ll say, It has, or It hasn’t.
there is no native word for "either" in Irish, any more than there is in Latin. And that in its turn throws a very important light on the Irish character—”

there, you are dealing with a living man, who will probably tell you that you are a liar. Then you tell him that he is losing his temper, which is the sign of a strong inhibition somewhere, and that’s just what you were saying all along. The beauty of psychoanalysis (psychanalyse) is that it’s all ‘Heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.’

In medicine, your diagnosis of fever is a trifle disconcerted if the patient’s temperature is subnormal. In psychoanalysis (psychanalyse) you say, ‘Ah, that just proves what I was saying.’ ”