At Swim-Two-Birds

by Flann O'Brien

The holy bell that thou hast outraged will banish thee to branches, it will put thee on a par with fowls— the saint-bell of saints with sainty-saints.

After that he went into the old tree of the church where he said another melodious poem on the subject of his personal hardship.

Do you know what it is, I’ve met the others, the whole lot of them. I’ve met them all and know them all. I have seen them and I have read their pomes. I have heard them recited by men that know how to use their tongues, men that couldn’t be beaten at their own game. I have seen whole books filled up with their stuff, books as thick as that table there and I’m telling you no lie. But by God, at the heel of the hunt, there was only one poet for me. On the morning of the third day thereafter, said Finn, he was flogged until he bled water. Only the one, Mr. Shanahan? said Lamont.

He is a great man that never gets out of bed, he said. He spends the days and nights reading books and occasionally he writes one. He makes his characters live with him in his house. Nobody knows whether they are there at all or whether it is all imagination. A great man.

It is cigarettes I smoke, said the Good Fairy, and I disincline to think that kangaroos are human.

In regard to the humanity of kangaroos, to admit a kangaroo unreservedly to be a man would inevitably involve one in a number of distressing implications, the kangaroolity of women and your wife beside you being one example.

A window without rat-flight past it is a backyard without a house.

The attic was infested by clocks. I found sleep impossible owing to the activities of bed-lice. Did you ever in your life take a bath? Mr. Justice Andrews rapped violently on the counter. Do not answer that question, he said loudly. I put it to you, said Trellis, that the bed-lice were near relations of other small inhabitants of your own verminous person.

Well-known, alas, is the case of the poor German who was very fond of three and who made each aspect of his life a thing of triads. He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.