"there is no such thing as a writer untouched by his time. Even the most inner experience is a response to some outside. That response may lead Kafka to explore the dark region beyond human experience or explanation in The Castle or Sean O'Casey to write from a sense of mission Red Roses for Me."

"Picked up his crumbs."

"Thus far we run before the wind."

"Wit is the most rascally, contemptible, beggarly thing on the face of the earth."

"Above the vulgar flight of common souls."

"When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create No trouble, no trouble in thy breast; Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate. Remember me, but ah! forget my fate."

"And silence their mourning With vows of returning But never intending to visit them more. No never, no never, intending to visit them more."

"While shepherds watched their flocks by night, All seated on the ground, The angel of the Lord came down, And glory shone around."

"For sorrow is our joy, And joy our greatest sorrow. Elissa dies tonight, And Carthage flames tomorrow."

"A place in thy memory, dearest, Is all that I claim; To pause and look back when thou hearest The sound of my name."

"When, like the rising day, Eileen Aroon! Love sends his early ray, Eileen Aroon! What makes his dawning glow Changeless through joy and woe? Only the constant know!— Eileen Aroon!"

"Every tub must stand upon its bottom."

"The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket; and the glorious uncertainty of it is of mair use to the professors than the justice of it."

"Sir, you shall taste my Anno Domini."

"[T]hose who know the least, obey the best."

"There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty."

"Cos. Pray now, what may be that same bed of honour? Kite. Oh, a mighty large bed! bigger by half than the great bed at Ware: ten thousand people may lie in it together, and never feel one another."

"Hanging and marriage, you know, go by destiny."

"I believe they talked of me, for they laughed consumedly."

"Poetry’s a mere drug, Sir."

"As she lay, on that day, In the bay of Biscay, O!"

"I hate all that don’t love me, and slight all that do."

"Crimes, like Virtues, are their own Rewards."

"Loud roared the dreadful thunder, The rain a deluge showers."

"’T was for the good of my country that I should be abroad."

"Necessity, the mother of invention."

"Some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their houses."

"Often in the theatre I can hardly hear myself talking or assuring my doxy that so-and-so is the same fellow that played so-and-so in so-and-so, he's very good, he's a civil servant in the Department of Agriculture, I met a sister of his in Skerries, and so on. Actors should conduct themselves like the rest of us and practise the unobtrusive intonation of the gentleman."

"Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill."

"If Irish were to die completely, the standard of English here, both in the spoken and written word, would sink to a level probably as low as that obtaining in England and it would stop there only because it could go no lower."

"It cannot be too often repeated that I am not for sale. I was bought in 1921 and the transaction was final and conclusive."

"Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country."

"The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at a crossroads."

"You told me what the first rule of wisdom is," I said. "What is the second rule?" "That can be answered," he said. "There are five in all. Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first...If you follow them," said the Sergeant, "you will save your soul and you will never get a fall on a slippy road."

"Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand."

"Is it life? I would rather be without it, for there is quare small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night's porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed jars and foreign bacon. Many a man has spent a hundred years trying to get the dimensions of it and when he understands it at last and entertains the certain pattern of it in his head, be the hokey he takes to his bed and dies. He dies like a poisoned sheepdog. There is nothing so dangerous you can't smoke it, nobody will give you tuppence halfpenny for the half of it, and it kills you in the wind-up. It is a quare contraption, very dangerous, a certain death-trap."

"My father...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings."

"Is it life?" he answered, "I would rather be without it," he said, "for there is queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon."

"Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places."

"I am completely half afraid to think."

"I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about."

"The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles."

"Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder."

"One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings."

"After a time," said old Mathers disregarding me, "I mercifully perceived the errors of my ways and the unhappy destination I would reach unless I mended them. I retired from the world in order to try to comprehend it and to find out why it becomes more unsavoury as the years accumulate on a man's body. What do you think I discovered at the end of my meditations?"

"Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable."