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An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never
convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer
it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to strangers', like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets. Larry
Doyle toTom Broadbent. John Bull's Other Island, act1.
"Shut your yelling, for if you're after making a mighty man of me
this day by the power of a lie, you're setting me now to think if it's a poor thing to be lonesome, it's worse maybe to go
mixing with the fools of earth. The Playboy of the Western World
He was born an Englishman and remained one for years. The Hostage
"The English language brings out the best in the Irish. They court
it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter. They hurl it at the sky like a paint pot full of rainbows,
and then make it chant a dirge for man's fate and man's follies that is as mournful as misty spring rain crying over the fallow
earth." T E Kalem - On Brendan Behan's 1958 play Borstal Boy, quoted in a Time advertisement, NY Times 17 Mar
79
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My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire: I was
the third of five sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old, where I resided three years, and
applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great
for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued four
years. My father now and then sending me small sums of money, I laid them out in learning navigation, and other parts of the
mathematics, useful to those who intend to travel, as I always believed it would be, some time or other, my fortune to do.
When I left Mr. Bates, I went down to my father: where, by the assistance of him and my uncle John, and some other relations,
I got forty pounds,and a promise of thirty pounds a year to maintain me at Leyden: there I studied physic two years and seven
months, knowing it would be useful in long voyages. Gullivers Travels
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It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz,
which is a very interesting old place. Being practically on the frontier--for
the Borgo Pass leads from it into Bukovina--it has had a very stormy existence, and it certainly shows marks of it. Fifty years ago a series of great fires took place, which made terrible havoc
on five separate occasions. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century
it underwent a siege of three weeks and lost 13,000 people, the casualties of
war proper being assisted by famine and disease. Dracula
Algernon. Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that? Lane. I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir.
I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been
married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person. The Importance of being Earnest
The Irish by States (Click here)
The Litchfield Literary Review.com (Click here)
Tuohys of the world.com (Click here)
The Connecticut Irish.Com (Click here)
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