Frank Delaney Quotes

Do you know what the difference is between Friendship and Love? Friendship is the photograph, Love is the oil painting.

We all belong to an ancient identity. Stories are the rivers that take us there.

Beneath its broad surface, storytelling should always work hard to say more than it seems to.

Start with the difficult and when it gets easy, everything else is easier.

Tonight, I'm certainly going to tell you a story, but 'tis a story with a difference because, unlike virtually every other tale I tell-in this case, I was there. And yet I know that although I was there, and I saw people who were real, they have since become somewhat imagined-because I now view them through my memory. That's something every human being does-but storytellers live by it.

Stories are where you go to look for the truth of your own life.

I believe the world of the spirit is in general greatly neglected and not at all served by the practice of faith as we know it, because religion isn't individual enough.

What are you like inside? Don't you have feelings where you love everyone, and at the same time you hate everyone? Or - don't you have times when everything goes the way you want, but nothing feels good or right? That's what I mean," he'd say, "about my black horse and my white horse.

Marriage is the gold standard of all relationships. It's the currency by which everything is valued.

that's the story of how Saint Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland forever and banished the Devil to England. Some people say that explains why there has always been such trouble between England and Ireland. The Devil stirs it up.

Stick a lighted candle up your backside to give yourself that inner glow.

There are some places you love with your heart, and there are some places that you love with your mind- the places that you love with both are called 'libraries'

I write - and then I write some more.

When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.

Writers have opinions - that, in part, is why they write. Therefore they have strong likes and dislikes.

Every pain is a lesson.

I'd have to struggle to find a subject in which I can't get some kind of interested pulse started.

For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war - bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges.

Guns discommode me. Their facility alarms me. Point and kill. Ruin someone's life. Remove at a finger pull deeply loved people, as important in their spheres as the sun in the sky. The very weight of a gun disturbs me-an insolent object, insisting on its own importance.

Draped across an armchair lay his famous long black coat, empty now, and hollow with missing him.

the Devil became desperate to get away. His way was blocked, so he bit a big chunk out of the mountaintop and carried it off in his mouth. Patrick, stunned at the size of the hole in the mountain, hesitated for a moment, and lost his advantage. By the time he looked up, the Devil had gone too far ahead to be caught. Patrick gave up the chase. Up ahead, at Cashel, the Devil stopped for a rest, and he dropped the stone out of his mouth. That stone became the Rock of Cashel, the most famous sight in Ireland.

Pg 12
"The wises men tell us that everything, sooner or later, changes. And all change commences with a specific moment. We say to ourselves, "I wont do this again, I must become different." And we succeed
eventually.

Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.

...habit of speaking in paragraphs.

Any attempt to ease guilt by justification is false. That the crimes of another appease none of one's own offenses. That, if one is being truthful, the greater pain is that of the offender. I know now that I would much rather be a victim of violence than a perpetrator

Storytelling, in print or speech, needs vital energy.

A thing doesn't have to be true, he said, for a person to get joy out of it. What it has to be is not evil or malicious.

Pg. 112-113

And he had other assets; one of them -- you'll be surprised at this -- was sin...Whatever it was, Patrick said how it weighed on him. He also exploited it -- because it enabled him to meet people on an equal footing. He was able to say, "Look, I'm not above you. I have my faults, too. I've done terrible things." Just because someone had once sinned, he said, didn't mean they were bad through and through. And that was part of his work in life -- to show that people might sin and still go on to live good lives.

Fair is a body pigment, that's all it is.

Should; shouldn't; ought; oughtn't - the enemies of contentment.

To have come from Ireland no matter how long ago is to be of Ireland in some part forever.

James left us, taking his great, informed soul with him.

Patrick had left behind some writings, and one of his most famous works was something many of us learned in school called "Saint Patrick's Breastplate," a kind of a cross between a hymn and a poem.

Marriage is very important. Marrying a girl is the most important thing a man can do. Never mind business or politics or sport or any of that, there's nothing so vital to the world as a man marrying a woman. That's where we get our children from, that's how the human race goes forward. And if it's too late for children, there's the companionship of a safe and trusted person.

Kitchens are for conversation. They're not just for cooking; they're for conversations.

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.

If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.

Find your soul and you'll live. Lose your soul and you'll die.

If you have a book, you have a friend.