Ireland Dancing To An Irish Reel Quotes

There's an energy that hangs between strangers even in a crowd. ~ Claire Fullerton

There is a feel about Galway you can wear around your shoulders like a cloak. It hangs in the air with its dampness; it walks the cobblestone streets and stands in the doorways of its gray stone buildings. It blows in with the mist from the Atlantic and lingers incessantly at every corner. I have never been able to walk the streets of Galway without feeling some unnamed presence accompanying me. ~ Claire Fullerton

Gansey said abruptly. "In we go. Ronan, don't forget to set the directional markers as we go. We're counting on you. Don't just stare at me. Nod like you understand. Good. You know what? Give them to Jane."
"What?" Ronan sounded betrayed.
Blue accepted the markers - round, plastic discs with arrows drawn on them. She hadn't realized how nervous she was until she had them in her hands; it felt good to have something concrete to do.
"I want you to whistle or hum or sing, Ronan, and keep track of time," Gansey said.
"You have got to be shitting me," Ronan replied. "Me."
Gansey peered down the tunnel. "I know you know a lot of the songs all the way through, and can do them the same sped and length every time. Because you had to memorize all of those tunes for the Irish music competitions."
Blue and Adam exchanged a delighted look. The only thing more pleasing than seeing Ronan singled out was seeing him singled out and forced to repeatedly sing an Irish jig.
"Piss up a rope," Ronan said.
Gansey, unoffended, waited.
Ronan shook his head, but then, with a wicked smile, he began to sing, "Squash one, squash two, s-"
"Not that one," both Adam and Gansey said.
"I'm not listening to that for three hours," Adam said.
Gansey pointed at Ronan until he began to breathily whistle a jaunty reel.
And they went in deeper. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Peter smiled as Concheetah sashayed across the ballroom floor
Concheetah sashayed towards him, wriggling her hips, full lips in a pout, followed obediently by the tentative, Tapping Ted dressed in tight shorts and singlet. Tapping? Tapping because he always wore conspicuous, tap-dancing shoes in the club.
Was Ted going to rip up the stage as a mincing Irish dancer or maybe perform a Gene Kelly routine or the Swan Lake ballet in taps? It was terrible to imagine. Peter bit his lip at that thought, hoping he wouldn't burst into howls of laughter.
He had noted after coming to several shows, that Ted usually stood at the side of the stage ready with a drink of champagne and an encouraging word and a dry towel to mop Her Highness's face. And he always cried during the
show's finale, Abba's Dancing Queen. Poor Tapping Ted. ~ T.W. Lawless

It was a garden, a walled garden. Overgrown but with beautiful bones visible still. Someone had cared for this garden once. The remains of two paths snaked back and forth, intertwined like the lacing on an Irish dancing shoe. Fruit trees had been espaliered around the sides, and wires zigzagged from the top of one wall to the top of another. Hungry, wisteria branches had woven themselves around to form a sort of canopy.
Against the southern wall, an ancient and knobbled tree was growing. Cassandra went closer. It was the apple tree, she realized, the one whose bough had reached over the wall. She lifted her hand to touch one of the golden fruit. The tree was about sixteen feet high and shaped like the Japanese bonsai plant Nell had given Cassandra for her twelfth birthday. ~ Kate Morton

Epigraphs from Ballroom Dancing: An Erotic Romance of Dominance and Submission

"He's like my father in a way - loves the chase and is bored with the conquest - and once married, needs proof he's still attractive, so flirts with other women and resents you."
- Jacqueline Bouvier, July, 1952, making an observation about her future husband in a letter to her priest "Father L," the Reverend Joseph Leonard of Dublin, Ireland.

"Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday, Mr. President..."
- Norma Jeane Mortenson, May 19, 1962, Madison Square Garden, New York City. ~ Anna Andreesen

Do you always drink from a glass?" she finally exploded.
Gavriel shook his head. "Over my lifetime, I have fed in nearly every way imaginable. Drinking from a glass is tame is comparison."
Meryn started to grin.
"Would you drink from a man?" Gavriel nodded.
"Would you drink in a van?" she asked, her eyes dancing.
"I don't see why not," he replied. Elizabeth stared as Meryn continued.
"Would you drink from an actor?" Again, Gavriel nodded. Laughing, Elizabeth shook her head at Meryn.
"Would you drink on a tractor?" Meryn could barely get the words out she was laughing so hard. Gavriel frowned. "Maybe from a farmer if the need were dire. ~ Alanea Alder

Some had hurled spears first. Those spears thumped into our shields, making them unwieldy, but it hardly mattered. The leading Danes tripped on the hidden timbers and the men behind pushed the falling men forward. I kicked one in the face, feeling my iron-reinforced boot crush bone. Danes were sprawling at our feet while others tried to get past their fallen comrades to reach our line, and we were killing. Two men succeeded in reaching us, despite the smoking barricade, and one of those two feel to Wasp-Sting coming up from beneath his shield-rim. He had been swinging an ax that the man behind me caught on his shield and the Dane was still holding the war ax's shaft as I saw his eyes widen, saw the snarl of his mouth turn to agony as I saw his eyes widen, saw the snarl of his mouth turn to agony as I twisted the blade, ripping it upward, and as Cerdic, beside me, chopped his own ax down. The man with the crushed face was holding my ankle and I stabbed at him as the blood spray from Cerdic's ax blinded me. The whimpering man at my feet tried to crawl away, but Finan stabbed his sword into his thigh, then stabbed again. A Dane had hooked up his ax over the top rim of my shield and hauled it down to expose my body to a spear-thrust, but the ax rolled off the circular shield and the spear was deflected upward and I slammed Wasp-Sting forward again, felt her bite, twisted her, and Finan was keening his mad Irish song as he added his own blade to the slaughter. "Keep the shields to ~ Bernard Cornwell

The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing. ~ Hermann Hesse

There is more in there than those trifles. There is the wild, beating heart of an artist, dancing at the cage of your chest and desperate to be freed again! ~ D.M. Mitchell

They were a deep emerald green, the exact same color as mine, and they glowed with an intensity I had never witnessed before. A slash of silver crossed each one, the sun's reflection making them sparkle like dancing crystals. The emerald irises appeared to be swirling in circles, creating the illusion that his eyes were never-ending. Flecks of darker emerald clustered around each pupil made my breath catch in my throat. Suddenly, my disheartened mood vanished, almost as if I had never felt sadness before. Something about these eyes held me in place, as if I had found a balance, blanketing me in a cocoon of comfort, free of worries and concerns. ~ Markelle Grabo

It's like being an athlete; you get into a certain shape where you really have the right wind, because it's all to do with breath. Because singing and dancing at the same time is not easy! ~ Liza Minnelli

An Irishman can be worried by the consciousness that there is nothing to worry about. ~ Austin O'Malley

This garden was peaceful and calm. Pink cherry blossoms and violet plum blossoms graced the sweeping trees. The petals fell like snowflakes, dancing and swirling until they touched the soft, verdant grass.
There was something familiar about this place.
Her eyes traveled down the flat stone steps. She knew this path, knew those stones. The third one from the bottom had a crack in the middle- from when she was five and the neighbor's boy convinced her there were worms on the other side of the stones. She'd hammered the stone in half, eager to catch a few worms to play with.
There weren't any, of course, but her mother had helped her find some dragonflies by the pond instead, and they'd spent an afternoon counting them in the garden.
Mulan smiled wistfully at the memory. This can't be the same garden. I'm in Diyu.
Yet no painter could have re-created what she saw more convincingly. Every detail was as she remembered. At the bottom of the stone-cobbled path was a pond with rose-flushed lilies, and a marble bench under the cherry tree. She used to play by the pond when she was a little girl, catching frogs and fireflies in wine jugs and feeding the fish leftover rice husks and sesame seeds until her mother scolded her.
And beyond the moon gate was-
Mulan's hand jumped to her mouth.
Home.
That smell of home- of Baba's incense from the family temple, sharp with amber and cedar; of noodles in Grandmother Fa's special pork broth; of jasmine ~ Elizabeth Lim

Mystery the moon
A hole in the sky
A supernatural nightlight
So full but often right
A pair of eyes, a closin' one,
A chosen child of golden sun
A marble dog that chases cars
To farthest reaches of the beach and far beyond into the swimming sea of stars

A cosmic fish they love to kiss
They're giving birth to constellation
No riffs and oh, no reservation.
If they should fall you get a wish or dedication
May I suggest you get the best
For nothing less than you and I
Let's take a chance as this romance is rising over before we lose the lighting
Oh bella bella please
Bella you beautiful luna
Oh bella do what you do
Do do do do do

You are an illuminating anchor
Of leagues to infinite number
Crashing waves and breaking thunder
Tiding the ebb and flows of hunger
You're dancing naked there for me
You expose all memory
You make the most of boundary
You're the ghost of royalty imposing love
You are the queen and king combining everything
Intertwining like a ring around the finger of a girl
I'm just a singer, you're the world
All I can bring ya
Is the language of a lover
Bella luna, my beautiful, beautiful moon
How you swoon me like no other

May I suggest you get the best
Of your wish may I insist
That no contest for little you or smaller I
A larger c ~ Jason Mraz

More wine for me, pour me some more!"

"You smart girl, I knew you're a smart girl, just teasing..."

Faces turn red, the dark earth blood is rising.

They wink at Pelka, wink at the host: "He knows his goods!" The women feel the buttons constricting them - they undo one, another, a third. By twos the guests go outside to get some air.

"Well, my dear guests, are you soaked to the gills? Eh? And now-to dance! Get lively!"

The table and the chairs vanish. The middle of the room is empty. Ivan the Monk jumps out of his hole, a tambourine in his hands: "Tim-ta-a-am! Tim-ta-a-am!"

"Eh-hey!" the redhead suddenly snatches the tambourine and sweeps off, tapping wildly in a circle. Eyes closed: a white sleepless sun-a white night on the meadow-white columns of smoke swaying over fires...

"Eh-ah!"-to whirl herself to death, to whirl out everything, to empty herself - nothing has ever been...

Heavy boots are thumping on the floor, beards fly in the wind, the frock-coat tails go flying... hey, get going, faster, faster - a hundred versts an hour! ("The North") ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

A very important part of the Irish way of life is death. See, if anybody else anywhere else in the world dies that's the end of it, they're dead, but in Ireland when somebody dies we lay them out and watch them for a couple of days. It's called a Wake. And it's great, it's a party, a send off. The fella is laid out on the table and there's drinking and dancing and all the food you can eat and all of your friends come from all over the place and they all stand around the wake table looking at you with a glass in their hands looking at you and they say "Here's to your health". The terrible thing about dying over there [Ireland] is you miss your own wake. It's the best day of your life. You've paid for everything and you can't join in. Mind you, if you did you'd be drinking on your own.

Dave Allen ~ Dave Allen

Dancing is more than the locomotive movement of the body because of a rhythm.
The locomotion of the body is just an outward expression of something that is genuine, deep, and resonates with your core.

A dancer feels every detail of the music, it's like there is something in you that responds to the sound in a way that only you can.
Dancing is more than a ritual, it is the place of oneness; the body, the soul and the spirit in perfect synchronization. ~ Paul Bamikole

I lived in a plenty tough neighborhood. When somebody called me a 'dirty little Guinea', there was only one thing to do-break his head. When I got older, I realized that you shouldn't do it that way. I realized that you've got to do it through education. Children are not to blame. It is the parents. How can a child know whether his playmate is an Italian, a Jew or Irish, unless the parents have discussed it in the privacy of their homes. ~ Frank Sinatra

But it became clear very quickly that I'd underestimated how much I liked him. Not him, perhaps, but the fact that I had someone on the other end of an invisible line. Someone to update and get updates from, to inform of a comic discovery, to imagine while dancing in a lonely basement, and to return to, finally, when the music stopped. ~ Marina Keegan

Lunch looks grand, Meg. You've really outdone yourself," James commented, loading his plate. He frowned down at an escaping carrot extending precariously over the plate edge and
eased it back with his fingertip, then grunted and promptly stuck the burnt digit in his mouth. "I've been trying to eat better, organic and all. Are these vegetables free range?" he asked with a straight face.
The table fell silent as several sets of eyes blinked owlishly back at him. With an equally straight face Beth speared a roasted wedge and studied it. "I don't think potatoes require much
grazing room, genius," she deadpanned. ~ Shannon MacLeod

I have time for only one drink," Jordan said, glancing at the ormolu clock on the opposite wall. "I've promised Alexandra to stand at her side at a ball tonight and beam approvingly at a friend of hers."
Whenever Jordan mentioned his wife's name, Ian noted with amusement, the other man's entire expression softened.
"Care to join us?"
Ian shook his head and accepted his drink from the footman. "It sounds boring as hell."
"I don't think it'll be boring, precisely. My wife has taken it upon herself to defy the entire ton and sponsor the girl back into the ranks. Based on some of the things Alexandra said in her note, that will be no mean feat."
"Why is that?" Ian inquired with more courtesy than interest.
Jordan sighed and leaned his head back, weary from the hours he'd been working for the last several weeks and unexcited at the prospect of dancing attendance on a damsel in distress-one he'd never set eyes on. "The girl fell into the clutches of some man two years ago and an ugly scandal ensued."
Thinking of Elizabeth and himself, Ian said casually, "That's not an uncommon occurrence, evidently."
"From what Alex wrote me, it seems this case is rather extreme."
"In what way?"
"For one thing, there's every chance the young woman will get the cut direct tonight from half the ton-and that's the half that will be willing to acknowledge her. Alex has retaliated by calling in the heavy guns-my grandmother, to be exact, and Tony and mys ~ Judith McNaught

I won't meet his glare. "I guess I didn't care." Telling him I meant to murder his sister probably wouldn't go over very well. It would definitely cancel out the Hallmark vote.
"Unacceptable. Don't ever risk your life like that again, do you understand?"
I snort, sending little air bubbles dancing upward. "Hey, you know what else I don't care about? You giving me orders. I acted stupid, but-"
"Actually, this is a good time to point out that I'm a Royal," he says, pointing to the small tattoo of a fork on his stomach, just above the border where his abs turn into fish. "And since you're obviously Syrena, you do have to obey me."
"I'm what?" I say, trying to figure out how an eating utensil could possibly validate his claim of seniority.
"Syrena. That's what we-including you-are called."
"Syrena? Not mermaids?"
Galen clears his throat. "Uh, mermaid?"
"Really? You're gonna go there now? Fine, merman-wait, I wouldn't be a merman." Really though, what do I know about fish gender? Except that Galen is definitely male, no matter what species he is.
"Just for the record, we hate that word. And by we, I mean you also."
I roll my eyes. "Fine. But I'm not Syrena. Did I mention I don't have a big fin-"
"You're not trying hard enough."
"Trying hard enough? To grow a fin? ~ Anna Banks

Oh, my love," Erienne breathed as he pressed his lips to her brow, "I was afraid you would come, and yet I hoped you would."
Light kisses rained upon her cheek and brow as he held her close, savoring the nearness of her while he could. "I would have come sooner had I known where they had taken you. I had not expected this of your father, but he will answer. I promise you that."
Erienne shook her head and replied in the same muted tone. "He is not my real father."
Christopher held her away, looking down at her wonderingly. "What is this?"
"My mother married an Irish rebel and got with child before he was hanged. Avery married her, knowing the facts, but he never told her that it was he who had given the final orders to hang my father."
Christopher gently brushed a tumbled curl from off her cheek. "I knew you were too beautiful to be kin to him."

-Erienne & Christopher ~ Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

I do rather like birds,' Abdullah Unul says. 'They're busy, active little things. They make do. Have you ever thought, if Istanbul were to have an official bird, what would it be? I bet you'd think stork straight away. Maybe a sparrow. Me, the official bird of Istanbul would have to be the seagull. What do you see dancing around the Ramazan lights, what' s following the ships up and down the Bosphorus, what's facing into the wind on the rocks down by the water side. The common or garden gull, that's what. For all those reasons, the seagull for me is Istanbul, but mostly because it practises kleptoparasitism. You may not have heard of that. I'll explain. It's a behaviour when one animal takes prey from another that has the job of catching or killing it. In seagulls it's letting some other bird do all the hard work of catching the fish or a bit of bread and then taking it off them as they're about to eat it. It's the reason they're the success they are. So, I'll have that Koran. Both parts. To be honest, I'd prefer cash, but I imagine there's a market for that gadgetry you have out there in Fenerbahçe. ~ Ian McDonald

The Sick Woman begins to see that life is wilder, more chaotic, harsher and more loving, paradoxical, and downright strange than she was ever taught. She discovers for herself the power of moon and the tides, the shifting of the stars and the seasons, the haze of pollen and shift in air pressure and how they impact her dreams, her moods, her body processes. She learns that she is not an independent automaton but a wild being woven of life and death, a chaos of magic, not a machine of logic. She learns that the outer impacts the inner in myriad ways. And vice versa. She learns that she is simultaneously weaker and yet more powerful than she ever knew. She is dangerous with this knowledge which does not appear in the medical books and bibles except as anomalies. She's singing from the wrong hymn sheet and messing up the patina of perfection that the patriarchy is aiming for. In a display of a million marching soldiers with polished boots, gleaming medals and straight legs, there is the sick woman, bare breasted, hair loose, scars showing, shameless, dancing to her own tune. ~ Lucy H. Pearce

Remind yourself where you come from.

I spent the majority of my life running away from Utah, from the life I led there, from the memories I associated with those early years. It felt very someone-else-ago to me. London changed me profoundly.
When we were dancing on DWTS together, Jennifer Grey called me one night. She was having trouble with her back and wanted to see a physiotherapist. "Can you come with me?" she asked. She drove us through a residential section of Beverly Hills. We pulled into a house with a shed out back. Oddly, it didn't look like a doctor's office. There was a couch and incense burning. An Australian guy with a white beard came in : "Hey, mates." I looked at Jen and she winked at me. This was no physical therapy. She'd signed us up for some bizarre couples therapy!
The guy spoke to us for a while, then he asked Jennifer if she wouldn't mind leaving us to chat. I thought the whole thing was pretty out there, but I didn't think I could make a run for it.
"So, Derek," he said. "Tell me about your childhood." I laid it all out for him--I talked for almost two hours--and he nodded. "You can go pick him up now."
I raised an eyebrow. "Pick who up?"
The therapist smiled. "That younger boy, that self you left in Utah. You left him there while you've been on a mission moving forward so vigorously. Now you can go get him back."
I sat there, utterly stunned and speechless. It was beyond powerful and enlightening. Had I really ~ Derek Hough

In 1953 there were two ways for an Irish Catholic boy to impress his parents: become a priest or attend Notre Dame. ~ Phil Donahue

Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us - grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one's own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another. * * * P ~ Susan Sontag

She loved sinking into her bed on evenings like this, but apparently she shouldn't, because it worried her aunts, who thought she ought to be out dancing. It worried her a little bit, too, because what if they were right, and because sometimes a great loneliness welled up in her and threatened all the dams she built to hold it back. You couldn't cure loneliness by wallowing in it, up above the world, on an island removed from everything. She knew that. But she had such a hard time with all the cures. They seemed rough and brusque and brutal, as if they abused her skin with a pot scrubber ... forcing herself into a mass of people, a stranger among strangers ... But it was much more tempting to curl up with a book under her thick white comforter.
Still, sometimes after she curled up, she regretted her lack of courage and felt bleakly lonely.
It was important to have a really good book. ~ Laura Florand

His expression was perturbed, as if he'd been reminded of something he had wanted to forget. But as his gaze slid over her bewildered face, his mouth curved a little, and he settled into the cradle of her body with an insolent familiarity that temporarily robbed her of breath.
"Mr. Rohan … how … why … what are you doing here?"
He replied without moving, as if he were planning to lie there and converse all day. His infinitely polite tone was an unsettling contrast to the intimacy of their position. "Miss Hathaway. What a pleasant surprise. As it happens, I'm visiting friends. And you?"
"I live here."
"I don't think so. This is Lord Westcliff's estate."
Her heart thundered in her breast as her body absorbed the details of him. "I didn't mean precisely here, I meant over there, on the other side of the woods. The Ramsay estate. We've just taken up residence." She couldn't seem to stop herself from chattering in the aftermath of nerves and fright. "What was that noise? What were you doing? Why do you have that tattoo on your arm? It's a pooka - an Irish creature - isn't it?"
That last question earned her an arrested stare. Before Rohan could reply, the other two men approached. From her prone position, Amelia had an upside-down view of them. Like Rohan, they were in their shirtsleeves, with waistcoats left unbuttoned.
One of them was a portly old gentleman with a shock of silver hair. He held a small wood-and-metal sextant, which had been ~ Lisa Kleypas

When I was 19, I thought I wanted to be an English civil servant. It was the most exotic thing at the time - can you imagine, in the middle of the IRA bombing campaigns? I saw an ad inviting Irish applicants for an induction course, so I signed up. ~ Colm Toibin

This is a great wedding. I like weddings." "It is a good one, isn't it?" she agreed. "But it was always going to be--Emma so efficient." "Isn't she," he said. "I like weddings." Lulu said nothing. "Weddings," he said after a moment. "Funny things, but I like them." Lulu stopped dancing and drew back to look up into his eyes. "If you say that one more time," she said levelly, "I won't take you to the Cheddar cheese shop." "Sorry," he said quickly "I like funerals, too, if that's any help? We do marvelous ones in Ireland, we're famous for them. ~ Gabrielle Donnelly

Its half a dozen legs, divided into segments – either four or five, it was difficult to count them - had an elegance of movement that Lily found enthralling. As though choreographed to a beat mimicking the thumping in her breast, the precise spasmodic jerks of their several bends made her think of Madonna dancing to Vogue. They had the faultless coordination of intertwining cutlery in the hands of a hungry magician – or of the Queen eating dinner alone. This rush of ridiculous analogies caused Lily to laugh with delight, loudly, now without the slightest fear that the fly might be disturbed, because this fly was unlike other flies, and Lily knew that it would know not to feel under threat. ~ Panayotis Cacoyannis