Best 95 quotes in «irish quotes» category

Overheard at O'Banion's Beer Emporium: "Pardon me, darlin', but I'm writin' a telephone book. C'n I have yer number?

Shamrocks And roses In an ever green flock Now Up to your noses Turning into a high stock! People nice and seen All around you green! These lucky streams Realizing major dreams. In strives, when in pain Call oh call up my name, Know it isn't in vain...

Refusing to lean back against him, Colleen sat ramrod straight until they reached the road. “I guess I should say thank you for saving my life,” she muttered then turned and slapped Faolán hard across the face. “And that’s for you having to save it in the first place. And I’m not your woman, you big, arrogant, lying, betraying…faery loving…” She searched for the perfect insult and couldn’t find one, “…Scot.” She gave a very unladylike snort. “Happy now? That fiery enough for you?

Sean's Bar on Main Street, Athlone, on the West Bank of the River Shannon, claims to be the oldest pub in Ireland, dating back to AD 900. The bar holds records of every owner since its opening, including gender-bending pop sensation Boy George (born George Alan O'Dowd to an Irish family), who the premises briefly in 1987

So go love someone that wants to love you back. Whoever that lad is will be one lucky person.

Some men never recover from education.

Submitted for your approval--the curious case of Colleen O’Brien and the gorgeous time traveling Scot who landed in her living room.” – Rod Serling

Sure and you've got to keep your own spitis up, for there's no one else will do that for you!

Thady begins his memoirs of the Rackrent Family by dating MONDAY MORNING, because no great undertaking can be auspiciously commenced in Ireland on any morning but MONDAY MORNING. 'Oh, please God we live till Monday morning, we'll set the slater to mend the roof of the house. On Monday morning we'll fall to, and cut the turf. On Monday morning we'll see and begin mowing. On Monday morning, please your honour, we'll begin and dig the potatoes,' etc. All the intermediate days, between the making of such speeches and the ensuing Monday, are wasted: and when Monday morning comes, it is ten to one that the business is deferred to THE NEXT Monday morning. The Editor knew a gentleman, who, to counteract this prejudice, made his workmen and labourers begin all new pieces of work upon a Saturday.

She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father’s words, and her mother’s, and her sister’s. Utterly unlike Onnen’s otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn’t there.

That's how vile I am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish! I think I hate Ireland more than I hate the theatre, and that's saying something!

...that it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

That was it. To be a rolling stone. In the romantic places of the earth. Ready for a fight, a frolic, or a feed. And since I was Irish, since I was Billy Hamill's son, since I was from Brooklyn: a drink too.

The English imposed their language on Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and they weren't terribly nice about it.

Their encounter had formed a strange chemical bond. Mitch, a hardened ruffian, had opened up the prison of his soul to her. And Kika, who led a bitterly puritanical existence, had started to make love to him on her sofa.

The Irish-Indians, who were of dark complexion, would many times claim to be Black Dutch or Black Irish and deny their rightful Indian descent in order to stay in their aboriginal lands.

The Irish mingled their Christianity with folk beliefs in fairies and changelings.

The Irish way of telling a story is a complex and elaborate one, complete with wild exaggerations, a certain delight in improbable fantasy, and a heightened sense of drama.

There is a war between the living and the dead, and the Irish stories keep harping upon it. ("The Queen And The Fool")

There's no such thing as a superhuman. But the only thing I got to tell you, if you take a dog and kick him around he's got to be alert, he's got to be more sharper than you. Well, we've been kicked around for two thousand years. We're not more smarter, we're more alert.

There was a dark aura about him, a hint of caged power in that deceptively casual, sprawled poise. Danger personified. If this had been a film she would have expected to hear the warning wail of an electric guitar creep over the soft background bustle of the city.

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad's third language, and much of that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench. In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand. All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue. I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

Though we are the fair ones, women are not to be trifled with!

To anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them the land they live on is like their mother. It's the only thing that lasts, that's worth working for, for fighting for...

She had a face which was not so much freckled as one big freckle with occasional areas of skin.

The 'most precious object of the Western world' is now a national monument of Ireland at the very highest level. It is probably the most famous and perhaps the most emotively charged medieval book of any kind. It is the iconic symbol of Irish culture. It is included in the Memory of the World Register compiled by UNESCO. A design echoing the Book of Kells was used on the former penny coin of Ireland (1971 to 2000) and on a commemorative twenty-euro piece in 2012. One of its initials was shown on the reverse of the old Irish five-pound banknote. It has been illustrated on the country's postage stamps. Probably every Irish bar in the world has some reflexion of its script or decoration.

There was always a big party on the night before anyone left for the States. They called it an American wake, because the whole community stayed up to keep the emigrants company through their last night on the island, just as they would have bidden farewell to a soul beginning the long journey towards eternity. There was almost no chance that anyone present would ever see the departed again

We are the rocks and reefs of the human sea, tumultuous outcrops, magnets for wrecks. The peaks of mountains you cannot see: that's us, all right. Dark even on the brightest day. Stony and defiant of the prevailing currents until we are eventually worn down and dissolved. Sometimes soaked and sometimes dry as a bone. Hammered by tides and grimly standing our ground against the pounding. Probably even secretly enjoying the pounding.

Well, they may not be civilized, but they certainly are confident—and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.

What followed was a great treat for me. This was Irish traditional music as I had hoped to see and hear it, spontaneous and from the heart, and not produced for the sake of the tourist industry. As I sat there with my pint in my hand, enjoying the jigs and the reels, I watched the joy in the player’s faces and in those around them who tapped their feet and applauded enthusiastically. Music the joybringer. No question of being paid, or any requirement to perform for a certain amount of time. Just play for as long as it makes you feel good. This was self expression, not performance. Someone would begin playing a tune and the fellow musicians would listen to it once through, hear how it went and join in when they felt comfortable, until, on its last run through, it was being played with gusto by the entire ensemble. This process provided each piece with the dynamic of a natural crescendo which could almost have been orchestrated.

What we share within our bed is immeasurably important to what we share within our hearts. We are young and healthy and deeply in love and ‘tis what is meant for us to share.

With a hand full of beer and a heart full of cheer, I’m as Irish as I can get, but add good times and some quick funny lines… and gold I make leprechauns sh!t. Sláinte! - Jess

You're a Scott," the Dark said, his lips peeled back in displeasure, as if just saying the word was revolting. "And you're Irish. I'm so glad we got that settled.

You were so intent on what your purpose would be. I remember it nearly word for word." "Recite it for me then, my Lainna." She smiled a warm, soft smile, and her eyes filled with light. "You would waken in your bedchamber with your lady beside you...

Up and down' is Irish for anything at all--from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.

You turn the lights on and off here and if you can’t sleep and want something to read there are books in the living room…” her voice broke off. “Wait. Can you read?” His chin took a slight tilt upward. “Aye,” Faolán replied, his voice cool, “in English, Gaelic, Latin, or French. My Welsh is a bit rusty, and I doona remember any of the Greek I was taught except for words not fit for a lady’s ears. I can also count all the way up to…” He looked down and wiggled his large bare toes, “…twenty.” – Faolán MacIntyre

...and yet again, I was beginning the long process of coming undone in the hundred vestibules of my own soul. Breakdowns were common to me by then, and I attributed them to that sour Irish gene. But I could cast plenty of blame on my washed in the blood of the lamb Southern roots also. Taken together, it looked like a wicked combination of destinies, Irish and Southern, forming a comfortable birthplace for lunatics, nutcases, borderlines, and psychos. I could not blame everything on a bar fight in Galway when I also had these smoldering fires of white lightning smoking in a copper coil...

A driver had been sent to meet us. He was gray-haired, short, and nimble and introduced himself. "I am Patrick and so is every fourth man in Ireland, and the ones in between are named Sean or Mick or Finn, and I'll be driving you.

Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening. And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.

Author? Author? Did you write these legs?' 'Yes." 'Well, I don't like dem. I don't like 'em at all at all. I could ha' writted better legs meself.

Because you’re not a one-night girl, Irish.” (...) “You’re my forever girl.

As she glanced down at the great distance to the ground below, she whispered in his ear, "You have obviously taken the heights of passion to an entirely new level, Killian O'Brien!

Blind ambition drives the foolish, while the soul directs the wise.

By now, he was also a 'Protestant Atheist', which he remained all his life.

Capitalism has come, not only to serve Britain's purpose by keeping the people divided, but, by setting worker against worker, it has profited by exploiting both. It works on religious prejudices. It represents to the Protestant workman any attempt by the Catholic workman to get improved conditions as the cloak for some insidious political game.

Cattle and metal treasure were the main forms of wealth in ancient Ireland—metal because it was rare, and cattle because they were useful. Cattle provided milk to drink and to make into cheese, and hide and meat after they were dead. If a king demanded tribute from his subjects, it would probably be in the form of cattle—in fact, a wealthy farmer was called a bóiare, or “lord of cows.” In the famous poem Táin Bó Cuailnge, a major war starts because Queen Mebd discovers that her husband has one more bull than she does. Celtic chieftains spent quite a bit of their energy stealing cattle from one another. They even had a special word for this activity, táin. (Cattle raiding wasn’t just an amusement for the ancient Irish; modern Irish people were stealing one another’s cattle well into the twentieth century.)

Cad é an mhaith dom eagla a bheith orm? Ní shaorfadh eagla duine ón mbás, dar ndóigh.

Father, I can’t take this,” I said. “Why not?” “Because you’re a priest, Father.” “And my money’s no good because of it? What are you? A member of the Masonic Lodge?” “Naw, Father,” I said. “I just feel guilty taking money from you.” “Well, you’re Irish and Jewish. You have to feel guilty over somethin’, don’t ya? Take the money and be happy ye have it.

Finding her voice at last, she asked, “What dreams are you having, sir?” “I dreamt I was in a spring field and a woman stands in the shadows just at the edge of the nearby forest. I haven’t yet seen her face, only her long beautiful hair. I always wake too soon.” He reached up to touch the hawk touchstone around his throat as he described his dream, rubbing it absently between his fingers. Lily lowered her lashes to hide her astonishment. “When you see someone in a dream but cannot see their face, it means you haven’t met them yet,” she explained. “Then perhaps I’ll dream of her again tonight and this time I’ll see her face.” He smiled, reaching across the table to take her left hand and lift it to his lips. “My name is Ian Kelly, and it would give me the greatest pleasure to know yours.” “Lily Evans. Around here I go by Raven.” She raised a shoulder, indicating the gypsy tent. “Lily--indeed, a most beautiful name. Now tell me,” he stared pointedly at her hand, “I see no ring that another has claimed you as his, so my confidence is strengthened. Look at your cards again, milady, and tell me if you see me in your future…

Flaws are beautiful differences that have been wrongly considered.