Irishness Quotes

#1. Writing about carrying the past on your back is a manifestation of my Irishness, because we go on and on and will for another two or three generations.

Jennifer Johnston

#2. You can take a man out of Ireland, but you can't take the Irishness out of the man.

Tyson Fury

#3. Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.

Patrick Kavanagh

#4. I'm representative of 21st century Irish design, so I promote Irishness all over the world wherever I go.

Philip Treacy

#5. As a young man on the streets of Derry, I saw Ian Paisley as an immortal opponent of everything to do with equality, justice, fairness, and respect for Irishness.

Martin McGuinness

#6. Making an Irishness to be proud of in a real Republic. It is the vision of a real Republic where life and language, where ideals and experience have the ring of authenticity which we need now as we go forward.

Michael D. Higgins

#7. No one would ever cast me as an aristocrat. I think the big thing about being an Irish artist is access to melancholy. Especially the American Irish. The availability of loss, some kind of pain, is an important part of who we are. I think my Irishness gave me that.

Brian Dennehy

#8. Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

#9. When I was growing up, I despised Irishness. I felt our music, our television and our books were just poor imitations of what came out of Britain and America. I was all set to abandon it entirely.

Marian Keyes

#10. I grew up wearing black arm-bands when the hunger strikers died. I went on those marches. I grew up basically a Provo, though I never obviously got into any activities. I was writing 'IRA, Brits out' on walls all over where I grew up, but that was a false sense of Irishness.

Glen Hansard

#11. Ireland has made its choice for the future and it has chosen the version of Irishness it will build. I know, and I will work with head and heart to be part of it with all of you in creating that future one in which all of us can be part of and part of us too.

Michael D. Higgins

#12. I have encountered on this long road an enthusiasm for an Irishness which will be built on recognising again those sources from which spring the best of our reason and curiosity.

Michael D. Higgins

#13. When I was growing up on our 53-acre dairy farm, we were obsessed with food; it was the center of our lives. We planted it, grew it, harvested it, peeled it, cooked it, served it, consumed it - endlessly, day after day, season after season.

Bobbie Ann Mason

#14. Each day is a branch of the Tree of Life laden heavily with fruit. If we lie down lazily beneath it, we may starve; but if we shake the branches, some of the fruit will fall for us.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#15. One's opinion should only be as strong as one's knowledge on the matter.

Eric Hirzel

#16. He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through, someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled.

Pete Hamill

#17. Simple was never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming too late.

Philip Roth

#18. O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

W.B.Yeats

#19. The thinking was that so long as the British kept our basic documents in their hands and so long as they kept the formal right to change them, changes in our system would be careful and deliberate.

Stockwell Day

#20. It is a perverse faith, in that it reveres the "environment" ahead of people who live in it. It is a most ascetic superstition, in that it demands we live less happily and less freely and with less prosperity - the opposite of, say, the Protestant work ethic that helped build Ontario.

Ezra Levant

#21. There is a place, September, oh, very far from Pandemonium. A place where it is always autumn, where there is always cider and pumpkin pie, where leaves are always orange and fresh-cut wood is always burning and it is always, just always Halloween.

Catherynne M Valente

#22. We may indeed assume, with a high degree of probability, that Jane Austen went commando.

Margaret C. Sullivan