1.“To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.”
2.“For you can't hear Irish tunes without knowing you're Irish and wanting to pound that fact into the floor.”
3.“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”
4.“If there were only three Irishmen in the world you'd find two of them in a corner talking about the other.”
5.“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”
6.“...that it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.”
7."It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody." Brendan Behan was spot on when he said this, don't you think? The quotes given here are proof of the wonderful things that Irish can come up with using just the English language.
8."It’s not that the Irish are cynical. It’s rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody." Brendan Behan was spot on when he said this, don’t you think? The quotes given here are proof of the wonderful things that Irish can come up with using just the English language.
9.“My people – before I was changed – they exchanged this as a sign of devotion. It's a Claddagh ring. The hands represent friendship; the crown represents loyalty... and the heart... Well, you know... Wear it with the heart pointing towards you. It means you belong to somebody. Like this.”
10.“We Irish prefer embroideries to plain cloth. To us Irish, memory is a canvas—stretched, primed, and ready for painting on. We love the "story" part of the word "history," and we love it trimmed out with color and drama, ribbons and bows. Listen to our tunes, observe a Celtic scroll: we always decorate our essence.”
11.“Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies' heads. Where they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe.
12.“Thankfully the rest of the world assumed that the Irish were crazy, a theory that the Irish themselves did nothing to debunk. They had somehow got it into their heads that each fairy lugged around a pot of gold with him wherever he went. While it was true that LEP had a ransom fund, because of its officers' high-risk occupation, no human had ever taken a chunk of it yet. This didn't stop the Irish population in general from skulking around rainbows, hoping to win the supernatural lottery.”