"The tune was sad, as the best of Ireland was, melancholy and lovely as a lover's tears."
— Nora Roberts (Born in Fire (Born In trilogy #1))

"I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time."
— Iris Murdoch

"To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart."
— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

"The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"Drink is the bane of my country, it makes us forget, stumble, aim at our landlord, and miss him by an inch."
— Finbarr Glynn

"Those in power write the history, while those who suffer write the songs."
— Frank Harte

"Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart."
— William Butler Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)

"Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul."
— Pádraig Pearse

"He saw the black water and the declining sun and the swan dipping down, its white wings flashing, and slowing and slowing till silver ripples carried it home. It was a scene which seemed the heart of this land. The lowing sun and the one star waking, white wings on a black water, and the smell of rain, and the long lane fading where a voice comes in the falling night.
--Ireland, said Scrotes.
--Yes, this is Ireland.
"
— Jamie O'Neill (At Swim, Two Boys: A Novel)

"My heart is quite calm now. I will go back."
— James Joyce

"There had been a time, until 1422, when a number of both Gaelic and Anglo-Irish students attended Oxford and Cambridge in England. But fellow students had complained that Irish living together in large numbers sooner or later got noisy and violent and there was no handling them. Accordingly, the universities imposed a quota system on Irishman, and decreed that those admitted must be scattered around among non-compatriots: exclusively Irish halls of residence were banned."
— Emily Hahn (Fractured Emerald Ireland)

"[Kurt Cobain] had a lot of German in him. Some Irish. But no Jew. I think that if he had had a little Jew he would have [expletive] stuck it out."
— Courtney Love

"… in these new days and in these new pages a philosophical tradition of the spontaneity of speculation kind has been rekindled on the sacred isle of Éire, regardless of its creative custodian never having been taught how to freely speculate, how to profoundly question, and how to playfully define.

Spontaneity of speculation being synonymous with the philosophical-poetic, the philosophical-poetic with the rural philosopher-poet, and by roundelay the rural philosopher-poet thee with the spontaneity of speculation be.

And by the way of the rural what may we say?
A philosopher-poet of illimitable space we say.

Iohannes Scottus Ériugena the metaphor of old salutes you; salutes your lyrical ear and your skilful strumming of the rippling harp.

(Source: Hearing in the Write, Canto 19, Ivy-muffled)"
— Richard McSweeney (Hearing in the Write)

"When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man."
— Frank Delaney (Ireland: A Novel)

"Grey morning dulled the bay. Banks of clouds, Howth just one more bank, rolled to sea, where other Howths grumbled to greet them. Swollen spumeless tide. Heads that bobbed like floating gulls and gulls that floating bobbed like heads. Two heads. At swim, two boys."
— Jamie O'Neill

"Though the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see,
Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me;
In exile thy bosom shall still be my home,
And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam."
— Thomas Moore

"Away with us, he's going,
The solemn-eyed;
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hill-side.
Or the kettle on the hob,
Sing peace into his breast;
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the woods and waters wild,
With a fairy hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand."
— William Butler Yeats