Irish quotes
Earth receive an honoured guest; WilliamYeats is laid to rest: Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter, Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand.
My name is Behan, Brendan Behan, after Saint Brendan, who got into one of our little Irish boats called a curragh one day in the sixth century and sailed across the Atlantic and found America, and when he'd found it, like a sensiblemanheturned around and sailed back and left it where it fuckin' well was.
Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.
Irish hurricane, a flat calm with drizzling rain.
Look at the Irish! Theyare the cleverest propagandists extant, and managed to persuade most people that they were a brave, generous, humorous, talented, warm- hearted race, cruelly yoked to a dull mercantile England, when,God knows, they were exactly the opposite.
He turn'd him right and round about, Upon the Irish shore, And gae his bridle reins a shake, With, Adieu for evermore, my dear, And Adieu for evermore!
Onthegreenbanks of Shannon, when Sheelahwasnigh, No blithe Irish lad was so happyas I; No harp like my own could so cheerily play, And wherever I went was my poor dogTray.
I remember on one occasion, when she was asked to sing the English version of the touching melody 'The Red-Haired Man's Wife', shereplied,'Iwill sing it for you; but the English words and the air are like a quarrelling man and wife; the Irish melts into the tune, but the English doesn't.'
They fought as they revelled, fast, fiery, and true, And, though victors, they left on the field not a few; And they who survived fought and drank as of yore, But the land of their heart's hope they never saw more, For in far, foreign fields, from Dunkirk to Belgrade Lie the soldiers and chiefs of the Irish Brigade.
Whenever I wanted to know what the Irish people wanted, I had only to examine my own heart and it told me straight off what the Irish people wanted.
To marry the Irish is to look for poverty.
If there is a distinctive Irish experience, it is one of division, exacerbated by the fact that division in a country so small seems perverse.But the scale doesn't matter.
Sir Patrick Rackrent lived and died a monument of old Irish hospitality.
Did the Warwickshire militia, who were chiefly artisans, teach the Irish to drink beer, or did they learn from the Irish how to drink whiskey?
I never met anyone in Ireland who understood the Irish question, except one Englishman who had been there only a week.
Irish Americans are about as Irish as Black Americans are African.
It seems that the historic inability in Britain to comprehend Irish feelings and sensitivities still remains.
It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.
He [John Hoban] believed by incorporating several features of the Dublin style he would make it more home-like forany President of Irishdescent.It was a long wait, but I appreciate his efforts.
Dress British, look Irish, think Yiddish.
Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet isthemiserable Irish Catholic childhood.
I am becoming like the Irish Census, broken down by Age, Sex, and Religion.
Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language: it isthe condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it. On that definition Swift ismore Irishthan Goldsmith or Sheridan, although by the usual tests they are Irish and he is pure English.
If we turn to early Irish literature, as we naturally may, to see what sort of people the Irish were in the infancy of the race, we find ourselves wandering in delighted bewilderment through a darkness shot with lightning and purple flame.
: (sits down opposite his fathercontemptuously).Yes, facts don't mean a thing, do they? What you want to believe, that's the only truth! (Derisively.) Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic, for example. : (stubbornly). So he was. The proof is in his plays.
The best thing about the violence in Northern Ireland is that it's all so ancient and honorable The Irish are in the same terrific position as the Shiites in Lebanon, the peasants in El Salvador, the blacks in America, the Jews in Palestine, the Palestinians in Israel (and everybody everywhere, if you read your history)enough barbarism has been visited on the Irish to excuse all barbarities by the Irish barbarians.
No modern Irish writer, even of the stature of Yeats or Joyce, is completely free from traces of nationalism.
And it is a good sign that this masquerading knight- errant, this pretended champion of the rights of every other nation except those of the Irish nation, should be obliged to throw off the mask today, and to stand revealed as the man who by his own utterances is prepared to carry fire and sword into your homesteads unless you humbly abase yourselves before him, and before the landlords of the country.
Scots are Jocks,WelshmenTaffies, and Irishmen Paddies or Micks butit is noticeable there is no similar designation for the English.
He was a black Irish type, with centuries of rebelliousness behind him, and I decided to chance it.
The government may tomorrow withdraw every one of their troopsfrom Ireland.Ireland will be defended by her armed sons from foreign invasion, and for that purpose the armed Catholics in the south will be only too glad to join arms with the armed Protestant Ulsterman. Is it too muchtohope that out of thissituation a result mayspring that will be good not merely for the Empire but for the future welfare and integrity of the Irish nation?
[Gladstone] spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question.Unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the question.
You jast keep your air on and listen to me.You Awrish people are too well off: thet's wots the matter with you.
On the platform stood a policeman of normal proportions, and instead of a revolver and a truncheon he carried a copy of Ben Hur translated into Irish, which he was evidently studying for an examination important to his professional advancement. MrThewless realised that the imperial might of Great Britain lay behind him and that in front was the philosophic republic of Mr de Valera.
'In about half a mile you cross the river by an Irish bridge' 'Whatever is that?' 'It'sjust a bridge, but built under thewater instead ofover it.' 'Extremely sensible.'
Divide not between Protestant and Papist. Divide not nationally, betwixt English and Irish. The King makes no distinction betwixt you.
The historic destiny of the Irish is being fulfilled on the other side of the Atlantic, where they have settled in their millions, bringing with them all their ancient grudges and the melancholy of the bogs, but also their hard, ancient wisdom. Theyalone of the newcomers are never fora moment taken in by themultifarious frauds of modernity. They have been changed from peasants and soldiers into townsmen. They have learned some of the superficial habits of 'good citizenship', but at heart they remain the same adroit and joyless race that broke the hearts of all who ever tried to help them.
What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish: America and American influence have educated them. Their first practical leader is an Irish-American.
If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilised.
When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side, What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect, What calculation, number, measurement, replied? We Irish, born into that ancient sect But thrown upon this filthy modern tide And by its formless spawning fury wrecked, Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.
Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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