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Quotes by Irish Authors
"O'Neill presents a very complex multi-layered kind of challenge. His characters are always deeply complex and, to a great extent, inaccessible."
"Gossip is more popular than literature."
"To smile at the jest which plants a thorn in another's breast is to become a principal in the mischief."
"It's my rule never to lose me temper till it would be detrimental to keep it."
"Just a few questions for you, Mr. Dunne. Or Kenny. Can I call you Kenny? I feel we've become friends in these past few seconds. Can I call you Kenny?"
"There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting."
"I grew up in the theater and danced ballet atrociously."
"I spent many years laughing at Harry Secombe's singing until somebody told me that it wasn't a joke."
"It's like you asked me about the depression thing: you grope towards an understanding of whatever it is your going through, and it's not personal, there are forces in play around you, and you seek to understand them and that way you can go on."
"Ceremonies are different in every country, but true politeness is everywhere the same."
"That old man dies prematurely whose memory records no benefits conferred. They only have lived long who have lived virtuously."
"Scientific corporations might well become almost independent states and be enabled to undertake their largest experiments without consulting the outside world - a world which would be less and less able to judge what the experiments were about."
"I didn't have a clue where I was going on my first lap of practice."
"With a cluther of limbs and organs, all that is needed to live again, to hold out a little time, I'll call that living, I'll say it's me, I'll get standing, I'll stop thinking, I'll be too busy, getting standing, staying standing, stirring about, holding out, getting to tomorrow, tomorrow week, that will be ample, a week will be ample, a week in spring, that puts the jizz in you."
"A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman."
"We shall be forced to attempt planned and directed research employing hundreds of workers for many years, and this cannot be done without risking the loss of independence and originality. This is a serious and fundamental obstacle but it may be overcome in two ways."
"Boys my age with whom, in spite of everything, I was obliged to mix occasionally, mocked me."
"Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."
"Making peace, I have found, is much harder than making war."
"My valor is certainly going, it is sneaking off! I feel it oozing out as it were, at the palms of my hands!"
"Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together."
"My ambition was to stop waiting tables. That was how I measured success: finally, I was able to stop waiting tables, and I was able to pay the rent, and that was by being a stand-up comic. Not a very good stand-up comic, but good enough to make a living."
"The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny."
"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad."
"I think the Irish woman was freed from slavery by bingo. They can go out now, dressed up, with their handbags and have a drink and play bingo. And they deserve it."
"Friendship will not stand the strain of very much good advice for very long."
"A part of sexuality may go to research, and a much larger part must lead to aesthetic creation. The art of the future will, because of the very opportunities and materials it will have at its command, need an infinitely stronger formative impulse than it does now."
"Some people have a tendency to get knocked down in this business and sulk and whine, and they just create a rod for their back, really. You have to have broad shoulders and get through it."
"Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
"They won't break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart. The day will dawn when all the people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show. It is then that we will see the rising of the moon."
"We are both drawn to surreal situations so the writing was a joy."
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