Brian O'Nolan Quotes

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.

"When things go wrong and will not come right,

I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind.

Do you know what I am going to tell you, he said with his wry mouth, a pint of plain is your only man.

"Who is Fox?", I asked.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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 mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?

Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.

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