"'The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.'"
— Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

"Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand."
— Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

"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?"

"That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant.

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."
— Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

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

Notwithstanding this eulogy, I soon found that the mass of plain porter bears an unsatisfactory relation to its toxic content and I subsequently became addicted to brown stout in bottle, a drink which still remains the one that I prefer the most despite the painful and blinding fits of vomiting which a plurality of bottles has often induced in me."
— Flann O'Brien (Swim-Two-Birds)

"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

"Is it life?" he answered, "I would rather be without it," he said, "for there is queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon."
— Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

"Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One Beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings."
— Flann O'Brien

"I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind."
— Flann O'Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds)

"Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable."
— Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

"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

"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 (The Dalkey Archive)

"After a time," said old Mathers disregarding me, "I mercifully perceived the errors of my ways and the unhappy destination I would reach unless I mended them. I retired from the world in order to try to comprehend it and to find out why it becomes more unsavoury as the years accumulate on a man's body. What do you think I discovered at the end of my meditations?"

I felt pleased again. He was now questioning me.

"What?"

"That No is a better word than Yes," he replied."
— Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

"...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 (The Third Policeman)

"The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you. When a man dies they say he returns to clay but too much walking fills you up with clay far sooner (or buries bits of you along the road) and brings your death half-way to meet you. It is not easy to know what is the best way to move yourself from one place to another."
— Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

"I am completely half afraid to think."
— Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

"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 (The Third Policeman)

"Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places."
— Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

"Who is Fox?", I asked.
"Policeman Fox is the third of us," said the Sergeant, "but we never see him or hear tell of him at because he is always on his beat and never off it and he signs the book in the middle of the night when even a badger is asleep. He is as mad as a hare, he never interrogates the public and he is always taking notes."
— Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

"Questions are like the knocks of beggarmen, and should not be minded."
— Flann O'Brien

"When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep."
— Flann O'Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds)

"In Boston he met a pretty lady, fat and forty, but beautiful with the bloom of cash and collateral."
— Flann O'Brien (The Best of Myles)