Brendan Behan Quotes

If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.

Brendan Behan

• Irish

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Quotes to Explore

• The economy in Ireland has been rampaging ahead for the last 15 years. Barring an international, political or natural catastrophe, things can only get better for the Irish.

  

  Eddie Murphy
  • Political
  • Better
  • Economy

• The characters in 'Ray Donovan' are not very articulate - we're the worst Irish family you could ever live next to in L.A.

  

  Eddie Marsan
  • Live
  • Family
  • Worst

• My grandparents never understood why my mother Noreen chose such exotic names for her children: Damon and me. My granny insisted on calling my brother Dermot - a good Irish name - until she died; I was just known as 'wee one.'

  

  Natascha McElhone
  • Children
  • Mother
  • Brother

• My dad is Irish. I spent my childhood going back and forth between Ireland and America.

  

  Olivia Wilde
  • America
  • Dad
  • Childhood

• It's not that I don't like American pop; I'm a huge admirer of it, but I think my roots came from a very English and Irish base. Is it all sort of totally non-American sounding, do you think?

  

  Kate Bush
  • American
  • Think
  • English

• The gun is not out of Irish politics.

  

  Ian Paisley
  • Politics
  • Gun
  • Irish

• Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.

  

  Lady Gregory
  • People
  • Great
  • History

• Politics is the chloroform of the Irish people, or rather the hashish.

  

  Oliver St. John
  • People
  • Politics
  • Irish

• My wife's a loving, funny, Irish-spirited person, and I'm still surprised at some of the things she says. She makes me laugh every day.

  

  Gary Sinise
  • She
  • Funny
  • Day

• If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.

  

  Oscar Wilde
  • Society
  • Teach
  • Listen

• I am Irish as a person, but I feel Jewish as an actor.

  

  Harrison Ford
  • Person
  • Actor
  • Irish

• Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.

  

  Patrick Kavanagh
  • Poetry
  • End
  • Irish

• I hold that the beginning of modern Irish drama was in the winter of 1898, at a school feast at Coole, when Douglas Hyde and Miss Norma Borthwick acted in Irish in a Punch and Judy show; and the delighted children went back to tell their parents what grand curses 'An Craoibhin' had put on the baby and the policeman.

  

  Lady Gregory
  • Children
  • School
  • Parents

• I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries.

  

  Eavan Boland
  • Up
  • Country
  • Imagination

• I got an Irish passport the other day. I love it. It's the best thing in my pocket.

  

  Sam Neill
  • Irish

• There are so many wonderful, wonderful musicians in the world, I cannot possibly make a distinction between the fact that they might play classical music, or bluegrass, or Irish traditional, or Indian music.

  

  Daniel Hope
  • World
  • Music
  • Irish

• I was born into an Irish Catholic family in the New York area in this great, wonderful, and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me, and it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith. How could such a thing be? How is that consistent with the concept of a loving God?

  

  James Comey
  • Great
  • God
  • Long

• I'm a big fan of the Irish accent. After a couple of drinks, I start to get a bit of an Irish lilt, too.

  

  Emily Ratajkowski
  • Couple
  • Irish

• My father was a San Francisco firefighter. He also was an amateur artist. Art ran deep on his side of the family, which originated in Spain. He painted our portraits. My mom, Jacqueline, was Scots-Irish. They met in 1947 when dad played for the Houston Buffalos, a minor league baseball team affiliated with the St. Louis Cardinals.

  

  Keith Hernandez
  • Family
  • Art
  • Father

• How do you spell the name of the Irish prime minister? It sounds like 'teeshuck', but we spell it 'taoiseach.' We respect foreign spellings these days - a sign of our more egalitarian times, perhaps.

  

  David Crystal
  • Respect
  • Irish

• I am Irish by race but the English have condemned me to talk the language of Shakespeare.

  

  Oscar Wilde
  • Language
  • Race
  • Irish

• It's a great wonder to me, the Irish attachment to our history. What is it but a series of lamentations?

  

  Dorothy Salisbury Davis
  • Great
  • History
  • Wonder

• The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.

  

  Ursula K. Le Guin

• If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.

  

  Brendan Behan
  • Irish