Irish Quotes
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No, young man. No jokes here. There's a time and place. When you say something in class they take you seriously. You're the teacher. You say you went out with a sheep and they’re going to swallow every word. They don’t know the mating habits of the Irish.
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The novel space is a pure space. I'm nobody once I go into that room. I'm not gay, I'm not bald, I'm not Irish. I'm not anybody. I'm nobody. I'm the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It's to get that person to feel what I'm trying to dramatize.
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It's very difficult to break in Europe unless you break in England, and it's very difficult to break in England if you're Irish.
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I believe that the interior life is the same for all of us. And because they're steeped in faith, Irish-American Catholics are a people who have a language for the examined life.
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I was raised Irish Catholic and went to Holy Names Academy, an all-girl's private Catholic school. I loved the nuns there and I love them to this day.
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My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn.
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I had moments with my father that were exquisite - the stories he told me about Cuchulain, the mythological Irish warrior, are still magical to me.
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All of my dad's family, his brothers and sisters, my nana and grandad and all of the cousins emigrated to Australia within two years of each other. Irish families are close at the best of times, but when you move to the other side of the world, we were like a big posse over there.
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partition of Ireland, ... the betrayal of the national democracy of Industrial Ulster, would mean a carnival of reaction both North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements while it lasted.
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The reality of life in Northern Ireland is that if you were Protestant, you learned British history, and if you were Catholic, you learned Irish history in school.
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First a piece of Irish wisdom: you should always listen to a bookie. For they have a saying, 'Money tells a good story,' and somewhere in their odds is a kind of science-fiction existentialism that decrees that we, the people, know everything. In other words, betting patterns often make for good, unconscious soothsaying.
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The fight in Ireland has been one for the soul of a race – that Irish race which with seven centuries of defeat behind it still battled for the sanctity of its dwelling place.
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We play our Irish songs a bit more loosely.
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I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
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I had grandparents who were native Irish speakers, and also, two of the four grandparents were illiterate.
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As I told Piers Morgan, 'Catholics have confession, whereas Northern Irish Protestants only have interviews.'
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I am still an Irish rebel to the backbone and the spinal marrow, a rebel for the same reason that John Hampden and Algernon Sidney, George Washington and Charles Carrol of Carroltown, were rebels—because tyranny had supplanted the law.
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I loved to talk about music to Nicky ... His influence came from people like The Beatles and The Beach Boys, and he had these ideas about layering vocals, painting landscapes with music. Roma knew about Irish mythology, told stories, wrote poetry and had this special feeling for lyrics. My grounding came from the classics.
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There are a few Irish writers who have a very strong influence on me, especially on the 'Take Me to Church' EP.
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Theatre has no national identity. It is something for the world, whether it is Irish, English, or French.
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My first thought when I came here was that I understood why there are so many great Irish writers - because there is something mystical in the air. There's always this cloudy, moody sky and it's challenging.
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Yeats regarded his work as the close of an epoch, and the least of his later lyrics brings the sense of a great occasion. English critics have tried to claim him for their tradition, but, heard closely, his later music has that tremulous lyrical undertone which can be found in the Anglo-Irish eloquence of the eighteenth century.
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The best thanks we could offer those who went before and raised the Irish working class from their knees was to press forward with determination and enthusiasm towards the ultimate goal of their efforts, a Co-operative Commonwealth for Ireland.
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Hispanics have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Come to that, the Irish and Italians and Jews also have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Thinking it over, everybody has a long tradition of defiance against authority. (Except the Germans, of course.)
