Quotes About Irish Language

#1. Although the Irish language is connected with the many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual decline of the Irish language.

Daniel O'Connell

#2. I fancy that the Irish language must have 57 different words for 'rain', in the same way that Inuit has for 'snow'. If, in reality, this is not the case, then I'm really glad I've never bothered to learn Irish'.

Stephen Price

#3. If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content torecognize myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one.

James Joyce

#4. Lusa turned to Crys, her eyes shining. "That was a luna."
Crys shrugged. "So?"
"So? So what? You want it should sing, too?

Barbara Kingsolver

#5. The English imposed their language on Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and they weren't terribly nice about it.

Howard Tomb

#6. We're living in a different world now in terms of employee needs, and companies have to offer alternative methods for getting the work done. Even under the most difficult circumstances you can have creative flexibility.

Anne M. Mulcahy

#7. I believe that the interior life is the same for all of us. And because they're steeped in faith, Irish-American Catholics are a people who have a language for the examined life.

Alice McDermott

#8. There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.

John Millington Synge

#9. Isn't that an odd philosophy for a vampire?

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

#10. He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands.

Alexander McCall Smith

#11. Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today.

Diane Wakoski

#12. Somebody once said that the Irish derived the greatest benefit from the English language. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter, they fling it at the sky like paint pots full of rainbow colors.

Malachy McCourt

#13. It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once How they mangle it and revere it. How they color even their silences.

Colum McCann

#14. Even if I did speak Irish, I'd always be considered an outsider here, wouldn't I? I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me, won't it? The private core will always be ... hermetic, won't it?

Brian Friel

#15. Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity.

John McGahern

#16. Every life is a canvas and every interaction is a brush, therefore we'd be wise to consider how we handle the paint.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#17. All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and every sort of nut from the farm - hazel, black walnut, hickory, butternut.

Paul Engle

#18. 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

#19. It is a most disgraceful shame the way in which Irishmen are brought up. They are ashamed of their language, institutions, and of everything Irish.

Douglas Hyde

#20. I've got many different voices - I have a Southern girl, an Irish girl. I have a gibberish language that you'd have to decipher. I guess I try to never take myself too seriously.

Rachel Miner

#21. Irish and English are so widely separated in their mode of expression that nothing like a literal rendering from one language to the other is possible.

Robin Flower

#22. Up and down' is Irish for anything at all
from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.

Anne Enright

#23. I always gravitate towards anything from Ireland. With Irish lit, I love the use of language, but also in many instances, the Irish writers are writing about people and circumstances that I can relate to.

Daniel Woodrell

#24. With our gift for language and willingness to stand up and be counted, as well as heaps of charm and charisma, we Irish have long been an integral part of American political life.

Rashers Tierney

#25. I sounded like Horton the Elephant. "A person is a person no matter how small." What the hell was I doing standing in the middle of a cave, in the dark, surrounded by wererats, quoting Dr. Seuss, and trying to kill a one-thousand-year-old vampire?

Laurell K. Hamilton

#26. Second-generation Hispanics marry non-Hispanics at a higher rate than second-generation Irish or Italians. Second-generation Hispanics' English language capability rates are higher than previous immigrant groups'.

Jeb Bush

#27. I am Irish by race but the English have condemned me to talk the language of Shakespeare.

Oscar Wilde

#28. There's three different kinds of Christian," said Cash. "There's preaching Christians, church-playing Christians, and then there's practicing Christian. I'm trying very hard to be a practicing Christian.

Steve Turner

#29. Irish is a leprechaun language.

Sammy Wilson

#30. Yes, it is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception - a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to ... inevitabilities.

Brian Friel

#31. I knew lots of Irish ladies in my life who would say daft things and then would just say something incredibly truthful in a very simple way with simple language - a few well chosen words that would take an intellectual five minutes to express. I like that.

Steve Coogan

#32. 'Ulysses' is the greatest anti-racist text in the English language, and it challenges right from the beginning the vicious racism which lies near the foundations of the Irish Free State and of the Irish republic.

Tom Paulin