Quotes About The Irish Language

#1. '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

#2. Colors add meaning to life,
Some hidden facts they do imbibe.
One color could signify two things,
The onus lies on us,
As to how we take it.

Garima Jain

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Irish is a leprechaun language.

Sammy Wilson

#6. 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

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

Oscar Wilde

#8. 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

#9. The spirit of my home is entirely bound up in a quality of space. I have only the objects I need and nothing more. Empty space in which to think and relax is both stimulating and calming.

John Pawson

#10. Sometimes what seems to be the ending of something is really the beginning of Everything.

Kate McGahan

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. The body needs food, warmth and water, but your heart needs more.

Claire Cameron

#19. 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

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

John Millington Synge

#21. 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

#22. If you have a company that doesn't sell its goods or services abroad and focuses only on the domestic market, it will keep paying a price.

Brunello Cucinelli

#23. 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

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

Diane Wakoski

#25. Myth: A stake through the heart will kill a vampire.
Truth: Well, duh. It would kill anyone.

Kimberly Pauley

#26. 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

#27. You can certainly shorten things and tighten things, we tightened up Jon's walk to Mance Rayder's tent. That was something that got tightened up a little bit because I had shot the hell out of that.

Alex Graves

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not.

George Orwell

#32. And if Sam considered himself lucky, Frodo knew he was more lucky himself; for there was not a hobbit in the Shire that was looked after with such care.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#33. 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

#34. You think I love flattery (says Dr. Johnson), and so I do; but a little too much always disgusts me: that fellow Richardson, on the contrary, could not be contented to sail quietly down the stream of reputation, without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar.

Samuel Johnson

#35. When the time is right, when these feelings of rage and unfairness once again overcome me, I will not faint. I will fight.

Rachel Cohn

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

Howard Tomb