Flann O'Brien Quotes
-
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.
-
My father...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings.
-
The only result my father got for his money was the certainty that his son had laid faultlessly the foundation of a system of heavy drinking and could be always relied upon to make a break of at least twenty-five even with a bad cue.
-
I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind.
-
I suppose we all have our recollections of our earlier holidays, all bristling with horror.
-
Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.
-
After a time," said old Mathers disregarding me, "I mercifully perceived the errors of my ways and the unhappy destination I would reach unless I mended them. I retired from the world in order to try to comprehend it and to find out why it becomes more unsavoury as the years accumulate on a man's body. What do you think I discovered at the end of my meditations?" I felt pleased again. He was now questioning me. "What?" "That No is a better word than Yes," he replied.
-
The first beginnings of wisdom...is to ask questions but never to answer any.
-
What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.
-
I am completely half afraid to think.
-
Still loved but deprived of grace.
-
Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places.
-
Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One Beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.