Irish Celts Quotes

Exquisitely embroidered tapestries lined the walls of Medb's bedroom, but their impact was somewhat reduced by the room's ambience. A musky odor with pungent accents of stale piss. ~ David H. Millar

-BDB on the board-
Knitter's Anonimous
May 8, 2006
Rhage (in his bedroom posting in V's room on the board)
Hi, my name is V.
("Hi, V")
I've been knitting for 125 years now.
(*gasping noises*)
It's begun to impact my personal relationships: my brothers think I'm a nancy. It's begun to affect my health: I'm getting a callus on my forefinger and I find bits of yarn in all my pockets and I'm starting to smell like wool. I can't concentrate at work: I keep picturing all these lessers in Irish sweaters and thick socks.
(*sounds of sympathy*)
I've come seeking a community of people who, like me, are trying not to knit.
Can you help me?
(*We're with you*)
Thank you (*takes out hand-knitted hankie in pink*)
(*sniffles*)
("We embrace you, V")

Vishous (in the pit): Oh hell no...you did not just put that up. And nice spelling in the title. Man...you just have to roll up on me, don't you. I got four words for you, my brother.

Rhage: Four words? Okay...lemme see... Rhage, you're so sexy.
hmmm....
Rhage, you're SO smart. No wait! Rhage, you're SO right! That's it, isn't it...g'head. You can tell me.

Vishous: First one starts with a "P"
Use your head for the other three.
Bastard.

Rhage: P? Hmm... Please pass the yarn

Vishous: Payback is a bitch!

Rhage: Ohhhhhhhhhhhh
I'm so scuuuuuurred.
Can you whip me up a blanket to h ~ J.R. Ward

There are three states of legality in Irish law. There is all this stuff which comes under That's grand, then it moves into Ah now don't push it, and finally it comes under Right now you're takin the piss, and that's when the police come in. ~ Dara O Briain

Well I had the perfect job, perfect house and perfect family and I didn't know it. I kept striving for more. ~ Annette J. Dunlea

I grew up Irish Catholic with a bunch of kids at Catholic school. ~ Brigid Brannagh

Come here, Amanda." His voice was a low scrape of sound.
"Oh, I can't," she said unsteadily. "I-I think you should go now."
Jack leaned forward and caught her wrist gently in his fingers. "I won't hurt you," he whispered. "I won't do anything that you don't like. But before I leave you this evening, I'm going to hold you in my arms."
Confusion and desire swirled inside her, making her feel unanchored, helpless. She let him pull her forward until her short limbs rested stiffly against his much longer ones. He ran a large palm down her back, and she could feel a trail of sensation in its wake. His skin was hot, as if a fire burned right beneath the smooth golden surface.
Her breath shortened, and she closed her eyes, shivering, luxuriating in the feeling of being warm all the way down to her bones. For the first time in her life, she let her head fall into the waiting crook of a man's arm, and stared up at his shadowed face.
As he felt the trembling of her limbs, he made a crooning sound and cuddled her closer. "Don't be afraid, mhuirnin. I won't hurt you."
"What did you call me?" she asked in bewilderment.
He smiled down at her. "A small endearment. Did I neglect to mention that I'm half Irish?"
That explained his accent, the neat cultured tones tempered with a sort of musical softness that must be Celtic in origin. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Many cultures believe that on a certain day - Halloween, the Irish Samhain Eve, Mexico's 'Dia de los Muertos' - the veil between this world and the next is especially thin. ~ Michael Dirda

Rain is also very difficult to film, particularly in Ireland because it's quite fine, so fine that the Irish don't even acknowledge that it exists. ~ Alan Parker

But let's just say, I'm Irish. I grew up in the 1950s. Religion had a very tight iron fist. ~ Liam Neeson

I'm just a true Irish boy at heart. ~ Colin Farrell

President Obama told the Irish people that America will always stand by them, to which Israel laughed. ~ Jay Leno

by a Scotch-Irish preacher, a Presbyterian named James Finley, in the year 1801, or before John Roebling was born. Finley had been a versatile and ingenious man. His "chain bridge" had a seventy-foot span, cost about six hundred dollars, and in the next ten years he built some forty more of them, including one over the Potomac above Washington. ~ David McCullough

If you own a bar on your own, you're a player; if you own it with your beloved twin sister, you're–"

"Irish. ~ Gillian Flynn

For all their reputation for chattiness and storytelling, the Irish I knew were so skillful with words there was sometimes no need for them at all. ~ Camille DeAngelis

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad's third language, and much of that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to w ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Let justice be done tho the heavens fall. ~ Michael Davitt

She had been born with a different name, to a woman with laughing eyes and warmly whispered words of love who'd died degraded and afraid on a misty Irish morning. ~ C.S. Harris

Here's a new 'Blessing' for our time
'May Anderson Cooper never be sent to report on your town! ~ Vera Nazarian

My father is Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino; my mother is half-Irish and half-Japanese; Greek last name; born in Hawaii, raised in Germany. ~ Mark Dacascos

Irish people will read anything as long as it's about them. That's what I think. We are our own greatest subject and though we've gone and looked elsewhere about the world we have found that there are just no people, no subject as fascinating as We Ourselves. ~ Niall Williams

Scarlet O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin-that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns. ~ Margaret Mitchell

Sir Patrick Rackrent lived and died a monument of old Irish hospitality. ~ Maria Edgeworth

It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. ~ Charles Dickens

But there's this thing in her voice, like what my mom called "doublespeak." Saying one thing and meaning another. Aunt Nora told me it was leftover from English rule. She said, "That's the only good thing to ever come of colonialism, Kevin. The Irish can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip. ~ Brian Malloy

[T]he hyphenation question is, and always has been and will be, different for English immigrants. One can be an Italian-American, a Greek-American, an Irish-American and so forth. (Jews for some reason prefer the words the other way around, as in 'American Jewish Congress' or 'American Jewish Committee.') And any of those groups can and does have a 'national day' parade on Fifth Avenue in New York. But there is no such thing as an 'English-American' let alone a 'British-American,' and one can only boggle at the idea of what, if we did exist, our national day parade on Fifth Avenue might look like. One can, though, be an Englishman in America. There is a culture, even a literature, possibly a language, and certainly a diplomatic and military relationship, that can accurately be termed 'Anglo-American.' But something in the very landscape and mapping of America, with seven eastern seaboard states named for English monarchs or aristocrats and countless hamlets and cities replicated from counties and shires across the Atlantic, that makes hyphenation redundant. Hyphenation - if one may be blunt - is for latecomers. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Do you ever feel that everything would be okay, if only you had an Irish accent? ~ Graham Parke

I am the byproduct of an Ellis Island orgy, basically. I'm everything. I've got quite a mixture in me. I know a lot of it and I don't know some of it. I'm pretty mixed up, but mostly Russian and Irish. ~ Gavin DeGraw

Treall

Tabhair dom casúr
nó tua
go mbrisfead is
go millfead
an teach seo,
go ndéanfad tairseach
den fhardoras
'gus urláir de na ballaí,
go dtiocfaidh scraith
agus díon agus
simléir anuas
le neart mo chuid
allais...

Sín chugam anois
na cláir is na tairnní
go dtógfad
an teach eile seo...

Ach, a Dhia, táim tuirseach! ~ Caitlín Maude

Though all the world betrays thee,
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,
One faithful harp shall praise thee! ~ The Minstrel Boy

I only take a drink on two occasions - when I'm thirsty and when I'm not. ~ Brendan Behan

For a while children live under their mother's skin. Then one day in the future, the mother lives under the child's. ~ Suzanne Supplee

I've never seen a nation more quick at finding joy in a sad situation than the Irish at a funeral. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

From my earliest youth I have regarded the connection between Ireland and Great Britain as the curse of the Irish nation, and felt convinced, that while it lasted, this country would never be free or happy. In consequence, I determined to apply all the powers which my individual efforts could move, in order to separate the two countries. ~ Theobald Of Bec

St. Patrick's Day is a day to celebrate our green heritage. The ancestry of Ireland. It is a day to celebrate what it means to be Irish and of Irish descent. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

But more than anything else, for the British folks Irish people were all terrorists. So when we went to Britain, it was always a lot of resistance to U2. And that's why we came to America. ~ Bono

On this day, millions of people ... throughout the world will gather to commemorate the life of Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. From his days as a slave in Ireland to his work as missionary years later, St. Patrick demonstrated a courage, commitment, and faith that won the hearts and minds of the Irish people. St. Patrick's Day also serves as a time for people of Irish descent from all traditions and religions to honor their native land and shared heritage. Their devotion to family, faith, and community has strengthened our country's character. ~ George W. Bush

Bullshit, as you Americans say.
He's Irish.
The Irish say bullshit too. ~ Kevin Hearne

You've got to learn to stand your ground and," she flicked her feet in a little Irish stepdance and sang, "you've got to have faith, faith, faith."
My jaw dropped. "You're kidding me, right? You're dancing in the streets and quoting George Michael. I'm about to get eaten alive! ~ A&E Kirk

What is in the marrow is hard to take out of the bone.
Irish Proverb ~ Dorien Kelly

So go love someone that wants to love you back. Whoever that lad is will be one lucky person. ~ Alisa Mullen

Before the famine, which was in the 1840s, that was an emotional turning point ... There are various documents showing how the Elizabethan English, in particular, were shocked by Irish displays of affection, by the way women acted toward strangers, walking up and putting their arms around them and kissing them right full on the mouth. ~ Frank McCourt

One of my greatest sadnesses at the prospective break-up of the Union is that it will set English, Welsh and Northern Irish against Scots in a bitter division of the debts and resources of the whole of the U.K. ~ Rory Bremner

An Irish Airman foresees his Death
I Know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love,
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death. ~ W.B.Yeats

We have seen that the priests regard the state as an enemy to be exploited, it is only natural that our politicians do likewise. Thus, although patriotism is held in greater esteem in this country than in any other country in the world, there is no other country in the world where patriotism is less in evidence among politicians and among the general mass of the community. For patriotism and the state are so closely allied that love of one is necessarily love of the other. And if any man considers the state an enemy and an institution to be exploited, it follows naturally that he is no patriot. Thus the amazed tourist will see that it is very fashionable for Irish politicians who are not in the government to denounce the government and then when they get into the government it is equally fashionable for them to use the powers of government for the purpose of robbing the country. ~ Liam O'Flaherty

You know, I have a theory about Charlie Haughey. If you give him enough rope, he'll hang you. ~ Charles Haughey

I'm crazy about Dublin. If you went back 3,000 years in my ancestry you wouldn't find a drop of Irish blood in the veins, but I love the place. ~ Harold Prince

I'm from durable stock. I'm made to work. I'm Irish. ~ Mary McCormack

I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing. ~ John Banville