Flann O'Brien Quotes
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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.
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I suppose we all have our recollections of our earlier holidays, all bristling with horror.
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I mean to say, whether a yarn is tall or small I like to hear it well told. I like to meet a man that can take in hand to tell a story and not make a balls of it while he's at it. I like to know where I am, do you know. Everything has a beginning and an end.
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I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind.
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Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.
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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.
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My father...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings.
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Questions are like the knocks of beggarmen, and should not be minded.
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The first beginnings of wisdom...is to ask questions but never to answer any.
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Still loved but deprived of grace.
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Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places.
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I am completely half afraid to think.
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What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.
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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.