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1fda5af
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In Ireland, you go to someone's house, and she asks you if you want a cup of tea. You say no, thank you, you're really just fine. She asks if you're . You say of course you're sure, really, you don't need a thing. Except they pronounce it . You don't need a . Well, she says then, I was going to get myself some anyway, so it would be no trouble. Ah, you say, well, if you were going to get yourself some, I wouldn't mind a spot of tea, at that, so long as it's no trouble and I can give you a hand in the kitchen. Then you go through the whole thing all over again until you both end up in the kitchen drinking tea and chatting. In America, someone asks you if you want a cup of tea, you say no, and then you don't get any damned tea. I liked the Irish way better.
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humor
ireland
tea
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C.E. Murphy |
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aa60303
|
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
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shaving
first-lines
ireland
opening-lines
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James Joyce |
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3833c35
|
My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.
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|
ireland
james-joyce
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James Joyce |
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10e7518
|
Be just before you are generous.
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|
ulysses
generous
ireland
just
james-joyce
stephen
justice
|
James Joyce |
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7f09c29
|
"So does nobody care about Ireland?" "Nobody. Neither King Louis, nor King Billie, nor King James." He nodded thoughtfully. "The fate of Ireland will be decided by men not a single one of whom gives a damn about her. That is her tragedy."
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war
ireland
england
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Edward Rutherfurd |
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70e2a18
|
I heard you went to Ireland...I haven't seen it in many years. Is it still green then, and beautiful? Wet as a bath sponge and mud to the knees but, aye, it was green enough.
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ireland
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Diana Gabaldon |
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02cf4c7
|
...early medieval Ireland sounds like a somewhat crazed Wisconsin, in which every dairy farm is an armed camp at perpetual war with its neighbors, and every farmer claims he is a king.
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|
ireland
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David Willis McCullough |
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9184fc3
|
The matter on which I judge people is their willingness, or ability, to handle contradiction. Thus was better than Burke when it came to the principle of the French revolution, but Burke did and said magnificent things when it came to Ireland, India and America. One of them was in some ways a revolutionary conservative and the other was a conservative revolutionary. It's important to try and contain multitudes. One of my influences was Dr Israel Shahak, a tremendously brave Israeli humanist who had no faith in collectivist change but took a Spinozist line on the importance of individuals. Gore Vidal's admirers, of whom I used to be one and to some extent remain one, hardly notice that his essential critique of America is based on Lindbergh and 'America First'--the most conservative position available. The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has--from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.
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india
influence
humanism
politics
contradiction
charles-lindbergh
collectivism
edmund-burke
israel-shahak
radicalism
spinozism
ireland
gore-vidal
partisanship
conservatism
french-revolution
free-thought
united-states
individualism
thomas-paine
revolution
israel
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Christopher Hitchens |
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e266a55
|
The History of Ireland in two words: . The Invasion by the Vikings: . The Invasion by the Normans. The Flight of the Earls, Mr Oliver Cromwell. Daniel O'Connell, Robert Emmett, The Famine, Charles Stewart Parnell, Easter Rising, Michael Collins, Eamon De Valera, Eamon De Valera again (Dear Germany, so sorry to learn of the death of your Mr Hitler), Eamon De Valera again, the Troubles, the Tribunals, the Fianna Fail Party, The Church, the Banks, the eight hundred years of rain: . In the Aeneid Virgil tells it as , which in Robert Fitzgerald's translation means 'They weep for how the world goes', which is more eloquent than but means the same thing.
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ireland
irish
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Niall Williams |
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d2c0bf5
|
That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!
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scotland
ireland
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Iris Murdoch |
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143a6e5
|
True the greater part of the Irish people was close to starvation. The numbers of weakened people dying from disease were rising. So few potatoes had been planted that, even if they escaped bight, they would not be enough to feed the poor folk who relied upon them. More and more of those small tenants and cottagers, besides, were being forced off the land and into a condition of helpless destitution. Ireland, that is to say, was a country utterly prostrated. Yet the Famine came to an end. And how was this wonderful thing accomplished? Why, in the simplest way imaginable. The famine was legislated out of existence. It had to be. The Whigs were facing a General Election.
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|
whigs
ireland
famine
potato
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Edward Rutherfurd |
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08636e8
|
"For the increase in the number of my Brennan cousins," Conall remarked dryly, "we must thank the potato."
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|
ireland
potato
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Edward Rutherfurd |
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07a1669
|
"Grace to me is a little bit of extra help when you're feeling stuck or doomed or, probably, hopefully, out of good ideas on how to save yourself, and how to salvage the situation or the friendship or the whatever it is," Anne Lamott once told me. "I wish it was accompanied by harp music so you could know that's what was happening, but for me it's that extra pause or that extra breath or that extra minute's patience against all odds." On that first trip to Ireland, grace--the kick-in-the-pants, clarifying, cosmic-pause-button kind of grace--didn't just have a harp. It had an entire soundtrack..."
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|
god-s-love
grace-of-god
ireland
grace
god-s-grace
|
Cathleen Falsani |
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68f8c4a
|
It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wide iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.
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|
identity
ireland
home
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Trish Deseine |
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446b024
|
It wasn't that I didn't feel like sharing. Mostly I just figured they couldn't do anything about it, so there was no point in worrying them. I said, 'A wee little bit,' instead, in honor of being in Ireland, where one adjective was never enough if three would do.
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|
ireland
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C.E. Murphy |
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f828294
|
Did you ever hear tell,' said Jimmy Farrell, 'of the skulls they have in the city of Dublin? White skulls and black skulls and yellow skulls, and some with full teeth, and some haven't only but one,' and compounded history in the pan of 'an old Dane, maybe, was drowned in the Flood.' My words lick around cobbled quays, go hunting lightly as pampooties over the skull-capped ground. -Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces
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|
vikings
ireland
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Seamus Heaney |
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3d0edf8
|
"I still don't know why we didn't hire a car to get around Ireland." "When I was a kid, I always dreamed about living in Ireland. I used to pretend I was one of the traveling people, driving my gypsy wagon from village to village. Used to picture a dark gypsy kidnapping me and having his way with me. Exciting stuff." Katy grinned at her. "Could still happen, you know." "Katy, we have a horse that's so laid-back I have to keep checking to see if he's dead."
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humor
ireland
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Nina Bangs |
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fba9d9e
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Most criminals are stupid. They creep $500,000 homes in the Garden District, load up two dozen bottles of gin, whiskey, vermouth, and Collins mix in a $2,000 Irish linen tablecloth and later drink the booze and throw the tablecloth away.
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|
garden-district
ireland
new-orleans
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James Lee Burke |
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08fb1a8
|
The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American slavery in place. Sometimes it withered him just to keep his mind steady. He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction. And the recognition of complexity was to be balanced against the need for simplicity. He was still a slave. Fugitive. If he returned to Boston he could be kidnapped at any time, taken south, strapped to a tree, whipped. His owners. They would make a spectacle of his fame. They had tried to silence him for many years already. No longer. He had been given a chance to speak out against what had held him in chains. And he would continue to do so until the links lay in pieces at his feet.
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slavery
ireland
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Colum McCann |
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3edb665
|
If you really have to get shot, Belfast is one of the best places to do it. After twenty years of the Troubles, and after thousands of assassination attempts and punishment shootings, Belfast has trained many of the best gunshot-trauma surgeons in the world.
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irony
ireland
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Adrian McKinty |
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7323779
|
more guilt, guilt, guilt. That's the Irish condition.
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|
ireland
irish
|
Adrian McKinty |
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2e216b2
|
It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wife iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.
|
|
identity
ireland
home
|
Trish Deseine |
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e09809f
|
"I step through origins like a dog turning its memories of wilderness on the kitchen mat: the bog floor shakes, water cheeps and lisps as I walk down rushes and heather. I love this turf-face, it's black incisions, the cooped secrets of process and ritual: -"Kinship"
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|
ireland
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Seamus Heaney |
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9b544a9
|
"A landscape fossilized, It's stone-wall patternings Repeated before our eyes In the stone walls of Mayo. Before I turned to go He talked about persistence, A congruence of lives, How, stubbed and cleared of stones, His home accrued growth rings Of iron, flint and bronze - "Belderg"
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|
ireland
|
Seamus Heaney |
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a2005e3
|
I click to buy it and I'm furious to discover that it's not available in Ireland and they won't post it from abroad and the only place that sells it is Harrods and it's impossible for me to go to Harrods because it's like being trapped in an Escher painting.
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|
humour
make-up
ireland
shopping
trapped
london
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Marian Keyes |