Dublin Quotes

“My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Being born in a stable does not make one a horse.”
― Arthur Wellesley Wellington

“...I live in Ireland every day in a drizzly dream of a Dublin walk...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“Then Mount Jerome for the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute.
Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick.
Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“But this was Dublin, the nation's capital. The place of my birth and a city I loved at the heart of a country I loathed. A town filled with good-hearted innocents, miserable bigots, adulterous husbands, conniving churchmen, paupers who received no help from the State, and millionaires who sucked the lifeblood from it.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“The thought of hurting him ripped me apart. Ripped me so totally, that I knew, I cared more for him than I did myself.”
― Samantha Young, On Dublin Street

“Did you ever hear tell,'
said Jimmy Farrell,
'of the skulls they have
in the city of Dublin?

White skulls and black skulls
and yellow skulls, and some
with full teeth, and some
haven't only but one,'

and compounded history
in the pan of 'an old Dane,
maybe, was drowned
in the Flood.'

My words lick around
cobbled quays, go hunting
lightly as pampooties
over the skull-capped ground.

-Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces”
― Seamus Heaney, North

“When you found someone you really loved, everything fitted.”
― Melissa Hill, Something From Tiffany’s

“I know you mean well, but you have to remember that things don't always work out like they do in your storybooks.”
― Melissa Hill, Something From Tiffany’s

“the whole worl's in a state o' chassis”
― Seán O'Casey, Juno and the Paycock

“Marooned by all but one of his new disciples, the busker complete his act unfazed. The perfumed air seems to be replaced by a faint electrical smell like ozone after a lightning strike. When the man becomes a sterling tableau in the setting sun, Leah stares into his unblinking moonstone eye.”
― Laura Treacy Bentley, The Silver Tattoo

“In the midst of a hive of customers and clerks, a small boy with blond hair neatly parted on one side stares up into the face of a bronze sculpture. It is Cuchulainn himself---the warrior light. The Hound of Coolan lashed to a boulder with spear drawn. But The Hound is leaning to one side and dying in a public hall of the Dublin Post Office.”
― Laura Treacy Bentley, The Silver Tattoo

“My most recent visit to the Iveagh Gardens was in the company of my younger daughter. She was sixteen at the time. I had brought her with me to show her a place precious to me, where I was once sweetly and unhappily in love. However, I discovered...that she knew the place well. Her boyfriend...lived nearby, and it was here, on weekdays after school, that they would come to walk, and be together, discussing the great issues of the day, finding out about each other, learning to grow up. As she told me this, in her not unkind though offhand way--the young are entirely deaf to the joggling palpitations of an aged heart--I had a sense of the magical timelessness of such places, and of the uses to which we put them. We change, we age, we stay or move away, and in time we end. The park, however, endures. It is a thought, I think, to comfort, if only by a little, the most distressed of hearts.”
― John Banville

“The original is displayed in a special darkened shrine now called the Treasury, at the eastern end of the library at Trinity College in Dublin, and over 520,000 visitors queue to see it every year, buying colored and numbered admission tickets to the Book of Kells exhibition. More than 10,000,000 people filed past the glass cases in the first two decades after the opening of the present display in 1992. The daily line of visitors waiting to witness a mere Latin manuscript are almost incredible. There are signposts to the 'Book of Kells' across Dublin. The new tram stop outside the gates of Trinity College is named after the manuscript. No other medieval manuscript is such a household name, even if people are not always sure what it is.”
― Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

“It was as if I had spent thirteen years specialising in a certain language, only to discover all its speakers had scattered and renounced their native tongue. No, worse than that, because at least dead languages could be studied. This was as if I had spent my life learning to play a certain unique instrument, only to see some crazed vandal smash it to pieces.”
― Emma Donoghue, Hood

“I don't believe he was ever dhrunk in his life - sure he's not like a Christian at all!”
― Seán O'Casey, Juno and the Paycock

“muttering Irish, he had had had o'gloriously a lot too much hanguest or hoshoe fine to drink in the House of Blazes, the Parrot in Hell, the Orange Tree, the Gilbt, the Sun, the Holy Lamb and, lapse not leashed, in Ramitdown's ship hotel since the morning moment he could dixtinguish a white thread from a black”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“My vampire novel, The Vorbing, was written when I lived n Dublin, Ireland. There was a park across the road from me that had a bat colony in it. I'd be writing about vampires after midnight, and you'd hear the sonar clicks of the bats near the window outside. You could say I was a method writer.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Pintman Paddy Losty.
Some of Dublin's great pintmen have been known to put away thirty pints or more in a day”
― Kevin C. Kearns, Dublin Pub Life and Lore: An Oral History