Flann O'Brien Quotes & Sayings

For my sustenance at night,
the whole that my hands can glean
from the gloom of the oak-gloomed oaks
the herbs and the plenteous fruits ... — Flann O'Brien

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

No genuine Irishman could relax in comfort and feel at home in a pub unless he was sitting in deep gloom on a hard seat with a very sad expression on his face, listening to the drone of bluebottle squadrons carrying out a raid on the yellow cheese sandwich. — Flann O'Brien

I cannot say whether there is fur on my wife's legs for I have never seen them nor do I intend to commit myself to the folly of looking at them. In any event and in all politeness -nothing would be further from me than to insult a guest- I deem the point you have made as unimportant because there is surely nothing in the old world to prevent a deceitful kangaroo from shaving the fur from her legs, assuming she is a woman? — Flann O'Brien

Whichever day it was, it was a gently day - mild, magical and innocent with great sailing of white cloud serene and impregnable in the high sky, moving along like kingly swans on quiet water. The sun was in the neighbourhood also, distributing his enchantment unobtrusively, colouring the sides of things that were unalive and livening the hearts of living things. — Flann O'Brien

Everything is composed of small particles of itself and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable other geometrical figures too numerous to mention collectively, never standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back again, all the time on the go. These diminutive gentlemen are called atoms. Do you follow me intelligently? — Flann O'Brien

Is there any body of citizens in the country who actually welcome and enjoy a General Election?..YES. Those citizens are schoolchildren ... attending national schools. It may be very cynical, but on the appointed day those Lyceums of lower learning are turned into polling stations, the homes of innocence temporarily become part of the grim apparatus of politics and the scheming of sundry chancers. — Flann O'Brien

Supposing you are a lady so completely dumb that the dogs in the street do not think you are worth growling at. — Flann O'Brien

The first beginnings of wisdom ... is to ask questions but never to answer any. — Flann O'Brien

A wise old owl once lived in a wood, the more he heard the less he said, the less he said the more he heard, let's emulate that wise old bird. — Flann O'Brien

And you would be unutterably flibbergasted if you knew the number of stout bicycles that partake serenely of humanity. — Flann O'Brien

Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country. — 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

He is as crazy as bedamned, an incontestable character and a man of ungovernable inexactitudes. — Flann O'Brien

My father ... was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings. — Flann O'Brien

still loved but deprived of grace — Flann O'Brien

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

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

Another day gone and no jokes. — Flann O'Brien

Evil is even, truth is an odd number and death is a full stop. — Flann O'Brien

Put a thief among honest men and they will eventually relieve him of his watch. — Flann O'Brien

You may have come on no bicycle," he said, "but that does not say that you know everything. — Flann O'Brien

A woman doesn't care if she hasn't a stomach, provided she looks as if she hasn't. — Flann O'Brien

The long evening had made its way into the barrack through the windows, creating mysteries everywhere, erasing the seam between one thing and another, lengthening out the floors and either thinning the air or putting some refinement on my ear enabling me to hear for the first time the clicking of a cheap clock from the kitchen. — Flann O'Brien

What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness. — Flann O'Brien

It is nearly an insoluble pancake, a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter. — Flann O'Brien

Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you. — Flann O'Brien

It is a great thing to do what is necessary before it becomes essential and unavoidable. — Flann O'Brien

I discovered that everything you do is in response to a request or a suggestion made to you by some other party either inside you or outside. Some of these suggestions are good and praiseworthy and some of them are undoubtedly delightful. But the majority of them are definitely bad and are pretty considerable sins as sins go. — Flann O'Brien

I am completely half afraid to think. — Flann O'Brien

I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind. — Flann O'Brien

We should not sleep to recover the energy expended when awake but rather wake occasionally to defecate the unwanted energy that sleep engenders. — Flann O'Brien

I was at a wake the other night and every man jack was drunk - even the corpse. — Flann O'Brien

I think it is true to say only an inferior person has rights. When you hear a person talking about his rights, you may be sure he is trying to gain by dint of shouting something which he lacks ( or had and lost) by reason of some culpable deficiency in himself. — Flann O'Brien

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

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

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

Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill. — Flann O'Brien

We were in an entirely other field by this time and in the company of white-coloured brown-coloured cows. They watched us quietly as we made a path between them and changed their attitudes slowly as if to show us all of the maps on their fat sides. They gave us to understand that they knew us personally and thought a lot of our families and I lifted my hat to the last of them as I passed her as a sign of my appreciation. — Flann O'Brien

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. — 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

Why should anyone steal a watch when he could steal a bicycle? — Flann O'Brien

Mr Corcoran, whom by chance I was observing, smiled preliminarily but when about to speak, his smile was transfixed on his features and his entire body assumed a stiff attitude. Suddenly he sneezed, spattering his clothing with a mucous discharge from his nostrils.
As my uncle hurried to his assistance, I felt that my gorge was about to rise. I retched slightly, making a noise with my throat similar to that utilized by persons in the article of death. My uncle's back was towards me as he bent in ministration.
...
I clutched my belongings and retired quickly as they worked together with their pocket-cloths. I went to my room and lay prostrate on my bed, endeavouring to recover my composure. — Flann O'Brien

Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death. — Flann O'Brien

Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places. — Flann O'Brien

Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first.

'If you follow them', said the Sergeant, 'you will save your soul and never get a fall on a slippery road. — Flann O'Brien

But which of us can hope to probe with questioning finger the dim thoughts that flit in a fool's head? — Flann O'Brien

I suppose we all have our recollections of our earlier holidays, all bristling with horror. — Flann O'Brien

Trellis wants his salutary book to be read by all. He realizes that purely a moralizing tract would not reach the public. Therefore he is putting plenty of smut into his book. — Flann O'Brien

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

Thoughts which have no chance of succeeding do not take the trouble to come into your head at all. — Flann O'Brien

Answers do not matter so much as questions, said the Good Fairy. A good question is very hard to answer. The better the question the harder the answer. There is no answer at all to a very good question. — Flann O'Brien

Could Henry Ford produce the Book of Kells? Certainly not. He would quarrel initially with the advisability of such a project and then prove it was impossible. — Flann O'Brien

Are your friends as good as MY friends? I can discern the nod of of assent but doubt it. My own friends are far better, they are famous people and they are all dead.
Who, you may ask, are those friends of mine, and why are they dead?
It is a fair question. They are dead because, had they lived, they would have died anyway from extreme old age and decrepitude. — Flann O'Brien

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

It is clear enough that you are making some distinction in what you said, that there is some nicety of terminology in your words. I can't quite follow you. — Flann O'Brien

Is it about a bicycle? — Flann O'Brien

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

When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN. — Flann O'Brien

If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflection, what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man — Flann O'Brien

Here I had a strange idea not unworthy of de Selby. Why was Joe so disturbed at the suggestion that he had a body? What if he had a body? A body with another body inside it in turn, thousands of such bodies within each other like the skins of an onion, receding to some unimaginable ultimum? Was I in turn merely a link in a vast sequence of imponderable beings, the world I knew merely the interior of the being whose inner voice I myself was? Who or what was the core and what monster in what world was the final uncontained colossus? God? Nothing? Was I receiving these wild thoughts from Lower Down or were they brewing newly in me to be transmitted Higher Up? — Flann O'Brien

Anything you do is a lie and nothing that happens to you is true. — Flann O'Brien

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

Anybody who has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition ... must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect. — Flann O'Brien

A man who takes into consideration the feelings of others even when arranging the manner of his own death shows a nobility of character which compels the admiration of all classes. — Flann O'Brien

Never before had I believed or suspected that I had a soul but just then I knew I had. I knew also that my soul was friendly, was my senior in years and was solely concerned for my own welfare. For convenience I called him Joe. I felt a little reassured to know that I was not altogether alone. Joe was helping me. — Flann O'Brien

Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable. — Flann O'Brien

Recently in mixed company ... I ventured to make the claim ( not without some show of humility and modesty ) that I was the greatest living swine. — Flann O'Brien

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

Only serfs or ex-serfs find it necessary to draw up a statement of their 'rights'. — Flann O'Brien

You're a terrible man for the blankets, said Kerrigan.
I'm not ashamed to admit that I love my bed, said Byrne. She was my first friend ... She will house me in my last hour and faithfully hold my cold body when I am dead. She will look bereaved when I am gone. — Flann O'Brien

Why be a dumb dud? Do your friends shun you? Do people cross the street when they see you approaching? Do they run up the steps of strange houses, pretend they live there and force their way into the hall while you are passing by? If this is the sort of person you are, you must avail yourself today of this new service. Otherwise, you might as well be dead. — Flann O'Brien

The only result my father got for his money was the certainty that his son had laid faultlessly the foundation of a system of heavy drinking and could be always relied upon to make a break of at least twenty-five even with a bad cue. — Flann O'Brien

happeinefs, what is it? lady, difterbed in her Bed, your thoughts of it? — Flann O'Brien

With these words there came the rending scream of a shattered stirk and an angry troubling of the branches as the poor madman percolated through the sieve of a sharp yew, a wailing black meteor hurtling through green clouds, a human prickles. — Flann O'Brien

The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at crossroads. — Flann O'Brien

Tuesday had come down through Dundrum and Foster Avenue, brine-fresh from sea-travel, a corn-yellow sun-drench that called forth the bees at an incustomary hour to their day of bumbling. Small house-flies performed brightly in the embrasures of the windows, whirling without fear on imaginary trapezes in the lime-light of the sun-slants. — Flann O'Brien

It worries me I may tell you. I sit at home every night thinking about it and smoking endless cigarettes. If you call at my place any night after seven I will show you one of them. Quite circular. Like a hoop. — Flann O'Brien

De Selby likens the position of a human on the earth to that of a man on a tight-wire who must continue walking along the wire or perish, being, however, free in all other respects. Movement in this restricted orbit results in the permanent hallucination known conventionally as 'life' with its innumerable concomitant limitations, afflictions and anomalies. — Flann O'Brien

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

Tell me, ' he continued, 'would it be true that you are an itinerant dentist and that you came on a tricycle?'
'It would not, ' I replied.
'On a patent tandem?'
'No.'
[ ... ]
'Then maybe you are no ... dentist at all, ' he said, 'but only a man after a dog licence or papers for a bull?'
'I did not say I was a dentist, ' I said sharply, 'and I did not say anything about a bull. — Flann O'Brien

The tense of the body is the present indicative; but the soul has a memory and a present and a future. I have conceived some extremely recondite pains for Mr. Trellis. I will pierce him with a pluperfect. — Flann O'Brien

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

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

I had never met these solicitors and never met Divney but they were really all working for me and my father had paid in cash for these arrangements before he died. When I was younger I thought he was a generous man to do that for a boy he did not know well. — Flann O'Brien