Top 60 Flann O'brien Quotes
#1. One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.
John Barth
#2. For my sustenance at night,
the whole that my hands can glean
from the gloom of the oak-gloomed oaks
the herbs and the plenteous fruits ...
Flann O'Brien
#3. I had never met these solicitors and never met Divney but they were really all working for me and my father had paid in cash for these arrangements before he died. When I was younger I thought he was a generous man to do that for a boy he did not know well.
Flann O'Brien
#4. Evil is even, truth is an odd number and death is a full stop.
Flann O'Brien
#5. This benign property of his prose is not, one hopes, to be attributed to the reason noticed by the eccentric du Garbandier, who said 'the beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the happy conviction that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greatest'.
Flann O'Brien
#6. You're a terrible man for the blankets, said Kerrigan.
I'm not ashamed to admit that I love my bed, said Byrne. She was my first friend ... She will house me in my last hour and faithfully hold my cold body when I am dead. She will look bereaved when I am gone.
Flann O'Brien
#7. A man who takes into consideration the feelings of others even when arranging the manner of his own death shows a nobility of character which compels the admiration of all classes.
Flann O'Brien
#8. If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflection, what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man
Flann O'Brien
#9. If you identify life with enjoyment I am told there is better brand of it in the cities than in the country parts and there is said to be a very superior brand of it to be had in certain parts of France. Did you ever notice that cats have a lot of it in them when they are quite juveniles?
Flann O'Brien
#10. When money's tight and is hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
Flann O'Brien
#11. He is as crazy as bedamned, an incontestable character and a man of ungovernable inexactitudes.
Flann O'Brien
#12. Trellis wants his salutary book to be read by all. He realizes that purely a moralizing tract would not reach the public. Therefore he is putting plenty of smut into his book.
Flann O'Brien
#13. I was at a wake the other night and every man jack was drunk - even the corpse.
Flann O'Brien
#14. What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.
Flann O'Brien
#15. With these words there came the rending scream of a shattered stirk and an angry troubling of the branches as the poor madman percolated through the sieve of a sharp yew, a wailing black meteor hurtling through green clouds, a human prickles.
Flann O'Brien
#16. 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.
Flann O'Brien
#17. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.
Flann O'Brien
#19. And you would be unutterably flibbergasted if you knew the number of stout bicycles that partake serenely of humanity.
Flann O'Brien
#20. It worries me I may tell you. I sit at home every night thinking about it and smoking endless cigarettes. If you call at my place any night after seven I will show you one of them. Quite circular. Like a hoop.
Flann O'Brien
#21. But which of us can hope to probe with questioning finger the dim thoughts that flit in a fool's head?
Flann O'Brien
#22. I think it is true to say only an inferior person has rights. When you hear a person talking about his rights, you may be sure he is trying to gain by dint of shouting something which he lacks ( or had and lost) by reason of some culpable deficiency in himself.
Flann O'Brien
#23. Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you.
Flann O'Brien
#24. Anybody who has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition ... must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect.
Flann O'Brien
#25. I suppose we all have our recollections of our earlier holidays, all bristling with horror.
Flann O'Brien
#26. I mean to say, whether a yarn is tall or small I like to hear it well told. I like to meet a man that can take in hand to tell a story and not make a balls of it while he's at it. I like to know where I am, do you know. Everything has a beginning and an end.
Flann O'Brien
#27. Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country.
Flann O'Brien
#29. Supposing you are a lady so completely dumb that the dogs in the street do not think you are worth growling at.
Flann O'Brien
#30. Only serfs or ex-serfs find it necessary to draw up a statement of their 'rights'.
Flann O'Brien
#31. The tense of the body is the present indicative; but the soul has a memory and a present and a future. I have conceived some extremely recondite pains for Mr. Trellis. I will pierce him with a pluperfect.
Flann O'Brien
#32. I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind.
Flann O'Brien
#33. Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.
Flann O'Brien
#34. happeinefs, what is it? lady, difterbed in her Bed, your thoughts of it?
Flann O'Brien
#35. Why should anyone steal a watch when he could steal a bicycle?
Flann O'Brien
#36. 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 crossroads.
Flann O'Brien
#37. Could Henry Ford produce the Book of Kells? Certainly not. He would quarrel initially with the advisability of such a project and then prove it was impossible.
Flann O'Brien
#39. Questions are like the knocks of beggarmen, and should not be minded.
Flann O'Brien
#40. Recently in mixed company ... I ventured to make the claim ( not without some show of humility and modesty ) that I was the greatest living swine.
Flann O'Brien
#41. You may have come on no bicycle," he said, "but that does not say that you know everything.
Flann O'Brien
#42. Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places.
Flann O'Brien
#43. When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
Flann O'Brien
#45. The only result my father got for his money was the certainty that his son had laid faultlessly the foundation of a system of heavy drinking and could be always relied upon to make a break of at least twenty-five even with a bad cue.
Flann O'Brien
#46. No genuine Irishman could relax in comfort and feel at home in a pub unless he was sitting in deep gloom on a hard seat with a very sad expression on his face, listening to the drone of bluebottle squadrons carrying out a raid on the yellow cheese sandwich.
Flann O'Brien
#47. In Boston he met a pretty lady, fat and forty, but beautiful with the bloom of cash and collateral.
Flann O'Brien
#48. Put a thief among honest men and they will eventually relieve him of his watch.
Flann O'Brien
#49. Answers do not matter so much as questions, said the Good Fairy. A good question is very hard to answer. The better the question the harder the answer. There is no answer at all to a very good question.
Flann O'Brien
#50. We should not sleep to recover the energy expended when awake but rather wake occasionally to defecate the unwanted energy that sleep engenders.
Flann O'Brien
#51. My father ... was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings.
Flann O'Brien
#52. Anything you do is a lie and nothing that happens to you is true.
Flann O'Brien
#53. A wise old owl once lived in a wood, the more he heard the less he said, the less he said the more he heard, let's emulate that wise old bird.
Flann O'Brien
#54. It is nearly an insoluble pancake, a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter.
Flann O'Brien
#55. Thoughts which have no chance of succeeding do not take the trouble to come into your head at all.
Flann O'Brien
#56. It is a great thing to do what is necessary before it becomes essential and unavoidable.
Flann O'Brien
#57. A woman doesn't care if she hasn't a stomach, provided she looks as if she hasn't.
Flann O'Brien
#58. Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.
Flann O'Brien
#59. The first beginnings of wisdom ... is to ask questions but never to answer any.
Flann O'Brien
#60. It is clear enough that you are making some distinction in what you said, that there is some nicety of terminology in your words. I can't quite follow you.
Flann O'Brien
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