Ireland Quotes

God and religion before every thing!' Dante cried. 'God and religion before the world.' Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash.'Very well then,' he shouted hoarsely, 'if it comes to that, no God for Ireland!''John! John!' cried Mr Dedalus, seizing his guest by the coat sleeve. Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb. 'No God for Ireland!' he cried, 'We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God!

~ James Joyce

Bí ann nó astáimse ag triall Ortagus má tácuirim geasa Ortmé a shábháilón dreama deirgur fear fuarsa spéir Thú.

~ Caitlín Maude

The tune was sad, as the best of Ireland was, melancholy and lovely as a lover's tears.

~ Nora Roberts

I was born Katie O’Reilly,” she began. “Poor Irish, but proud of it. I boarded the Titanic at Queenstown as a third class passenger with nothing more than the clothes on my back. And the law at my heels.” Titanic Rhapsody

~ Jina Bacarr

You were so intent on what your purpose would be. I remember it nearly word for word.Recite it for me then, my Lainna.She smiled a warm, soft smile, and her eyes filled with light.You would waken in your bedchamber with your lady beside you...

~ Leigh Ann Edwards

Alainn, it is no herb that has made me so entirely insatiable, 'tis just being with you.

~ Leigh Ann Edwards

Our place is here, our time is now! Killian firmly declared.

~ Leigh Ann Edwards

I've no plans to couple with anyone other than my new bride for the next century or so, and it feels as though it's takin' a century to get to it!

~ Leigh Ann Edwards

In truth, I doubt I'd notice if a herd of giant Irish elk stomped through the entire chamber when I'm in the act of lovin' you, Lainna!

~ Leigh Ann Edwards

By God, Lainna, have you truly no notion how badly I want you, then?Oh, but did you not once tell me the anticipation is half the pleasure of it?

~ Leigh Ann Edwards

I think I could spend an eternity with you, Killian, and never tire of hearing you speak to me.

~ Leigh Ann Edwards

As she glanced down at the great distance to the ground below, she whispered in his ear, You have obviously taken the heights of passion to an entirely new level, Killian O'Brien!

~ Leigh Ann Edwards

Cad é an mhaith dom eagla a bheith orm? Ní shaorfadh eagla duine ón mbás, dar ndóigh.

~ Peig Sayers

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

~ W.h. Auden

World is suddener than we fancy it.

~ Louis Macneice

Take that rage, put it on a page, take the page to the stage, blow the roof off the place.

~ The Script

In prehistoric times, early man was bowled over by natural events: rain, thunder, lightning, the violent shaking and moving of the ground, mountains spewing deathly hot lava, the glow of the moon, the burning heat of the sun, the twinkling of the stars. Our human brain searched for an answer, and the conclusion was that it all must be caused by something greater than ourselves - this, of course, sprouted the earliest seeds of religion. This theory is certainly reflected in faery lore. In the beautiful sloping hills of Connemara in Ireland, for example, faeries were believed to have been just as beautiful, peaceful, and pleasant as the world around them. But in the Scottish Highlands, with their dark, brooding mountains and eerie highland lakes, villagers warned of deadly water-kelpies and spirit characters that packed a bit more punch.

~ Signe Pike

I painlessly came to realize that the reverence I felt for the holiness of life is not ever likely to be entirely at home in organized religion. It was later, when I was able to travel farther , that the presence of holiness and mystery seemed, as far as my vision was able to see, to descend into the windows of Chartres, the stone peasant figures of Autun, the tall sheets of gold on the walls of Torcello that reflected the light of the sea; in the frescoes of Piero, of Giotto; in the shell of a church wall in Ireland still standing on a floor of sheep-cropped grass with no ceiling other than he changing sky.

~ Eudora Welty

So does nobody care about Ireland?Nobody. Neither King Louis, nor King Billie, nor King James. He nodded thoughtfully. The fate of Ireland will be decided by men not a single one of whom gives a damn about her. That is her tragedy.

~ Edward Rutherfurd

I make my way back whistling. Gerry nods towards Mrs Brady who is standing beside the trolleys.Morning, Mrs Brady, I say cheerfully.I push her provisions out to the car.Things are something terrible, she says. You can't trust anybody.No.It's come to a sorry pass.It has.There's hormones in the beef and tranquillizers in the bacon. There's men with breasts and women with mickeys. All from eating meat.Now.I steer a path between a crowd of people while she keeps step alongside.Can you believe it - they're feeding the pigs Valium. If you boil a bit of bacon you have to lie down afterwards. Dear oh dear.Yes, I nod.The thought of food makes me ill.The pigs are getting depressed in those sheds. If they get depressed they lose weight. So they tranquillize them. Where will it end?I don't know, Mrs Brady, I say. I begin filling the boot. That's why I started buying lamb. Then along came Chernobyl. Now you can't even have lamb stew or you'll light up at night! I swear. And when they've left you with nothing safe to eat, next thing they come along and tell you you can't live in your own house.I haven't heard of that one, Mrs Brady.Listen to me. She took my elbow. It could all happen that you're in your own house and the next thing is there's radiation bubbling under the floorboards.What?It comes right at you through the foundations. Watch the yogurts. Did you hear of th

~ Dermot Healy

I heard you went to Ireland...I haven't seen it in many years. Is it still green then, and beautiful?Wet as a bath sponge and mud to the knees but, aye, it was green enough.

~ Diana Gabaldon

What can I say? I'm Irish, I love a good potato.

~ Sophia Tallon

I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.

~ Iris Murdoch

Like a lot of stupid people, it took a great deal to get an idea into the king's head, but once there, there was no shifting it.

~ Richard Killeen

Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening.And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.

~ Peter Hitchens

...early medieval Ireland sounds like a somewhat crazed Wisconsin, in which every dairy farm is an armed camp at perpetual war with its neighbors, and every farmer claims he is a king.

~ David Willis Mccullough

There had been a time, until 1422, when a number of both Gaelic and Anglo-Irish students attended Oxford and Cambridge in England. But fellow students had complained that Irish living together in large numbers sooner or later got noisy and violent and there was no handling them. Accordingly, the universities imposed a quota system on Irishman, and decreed that those admitted must be scattered around among non-compatriots: exclusively Irish halls of residence were banned.

~ Emily Hahn

There was a certain untamed energy about the west of Ireland – full of tragedy and struggle, sown with the flesh of the departed.

~ Rhian J. Martin

And if I was bewildered through those decades, totally bewildered, so was the country I came from. The majority, what was the phrase? 'Condemn utterly what is happening, this barbarity.' But that's all we did. Condemn. And march. But not often enough.

~ Josephine Hart

When boys called Bob and Bono would bring their own wild-rhythm celebration and the world would fall down in worshipful hallelujahs as it again acknowledged Ireland's capacity to create missionaries. So what if they were the boys in the band? They sang from a pulpit, an enormous pulpit looking down on a congregation that would knock your eyes out. A city that had produced Joyce and Beckett and Yeats, a country that had produced poet-heroes and more priests and nuns per head of population than almost any on earth was not going to spawn boys who just wanted to stand before a packed hall of gyrating teenagers and strum their guitars and sing. They had to have a message. One of salvation; they were in it to save the world. Like I said, we're teachers, missionaries.

~ Josephine Hart

Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not a familar echo of the present, for if it is familar why revist it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time.

~ Richard White

History is the enemy of memory.

~ Richard White

THAT crazed girl improvising her music.Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,Her soul in division from itselfClimbing, falling She knew not where,Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declareA beautiful lofty thing, or a thingHeroically lost, heroically found.No matter what disaster occurredShe stood in desperate music wound,Wound, wound, and she made in her triumphWhere the bales and the baskets layNo common intelligible soundBut sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea

~ W.b. Yeats

It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

My own brother calling me a brickhead. Sneering faeries insulting me. Women punching me in the face. How much more am I to swallow in one bloody day?

~ Nora Roberts

Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there.

~ Bernie Mcgill

Funny how I keep forgetting you’re insane.” - Colleen O’Brien

~ Shannon Macleod

Identify yourself,” Colleen demanded. “I’ve got a bat and I will beat the living shit out of you if you so much as blink. I’ve got a black belt,” she lied frantically, “and…and…a gun. A big one.” - Colleen O’Brien

~ Shannon Macleod

Food shouldn’t be that shade of green, lass.” – Faolán MacIntyre

~ Shannon Macleod

His deep voice drifted to her through the crowd of women. “…my lady when she returns. Och, there ye are, Blossom,” Faolán grinned, standing up and taking her hand so she could ease back into the restaurant booth. “These lasses were just asking if I was a stripper. I told them I doona think so,” he said, his face clouded with uncertainty. “I’m not, am I?”The inquisitive lasses in question flushed scarlet and scattered to the four corners of the room at the murderous look on Colleen’s face. “No, you’re not, but I guess I can see how they’d think that,” she muttered darkly. “What you are is a freaking estrogen magnet.

~ Shannon Macleod