Flann O'Brien Quotes
-
A wise old owl once lived in a wood, the more he heard the less he said, the less he said the more he heard, let's emulate that wise old bird.
-
Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country.
-
The dusk was performing its customary intransitive operation of "gathering".
-
Another day gone and no jokes.
-
Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.
-
A woman doesn't care if she hasn't a stomach, provided she looks as if she hasn't.
-
The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.
-
Why be a dumb dud? Do your friends shun you? Do people cross the street when they see you approaching? Do they run up the steps of strange houses, pretend they live there and force their way into the hall while you are passing by? If this is the sort of person you are, you must avail yourself today of this new service. Otherwise, you might as well be dead.
-
Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.
-
Do you know what I am going to tell you, he said with his wry mouth, a pint of plain is your only man. Notwithstanding this eulogy, I soon found that the mass of plain porter bears an unsatisfactory relation to its toxic content and I subsequently became addicted to brown stout in bottle, a drink which still remains the one that I prefer the most despite the painful and blinding fits of vomiting which a plurality of bottles has often induced in me.
-
Some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their houses.
-
The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at crossroads.
-
Rome wasn't built in A.D.
-
Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.
-
Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you.
-
Why should anyone steal a watch when he could steal a bicycle?
-
It is clear enough that you are making some distinction in what you said, that there is some nicety of terminology in your words. I can't quite follow you.
-
He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled on a photograph of his wife with his dying hand goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
-
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.
-
When things go wrong and will not come right, Though you do the best you can, When life looks black as the hour of night, A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
-
When money's tight and is hard to get And your horse has also ran, When all you have is a heap of debt A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
-
Anybody who has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition ... must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect.
-
Could Henry Ford produce the Book of Kells? Certainly not. He would quarrel initially with the advisability of such a project and then prove it was impossible.
-
The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you. When a man dies they say he returns to clay but too much walking fills you up with clay far sooner (or buries bits of you along the road) and brings your death half-way to meet you. It is not easy to know what is the best way to move yourself from one place to another.