Joseph O'Connor Quotes & Sayings

Boredom is a bit of a bore, to say the least. — Joseph O'Connor

The most important thing I would learn in school was that almost everything I would learn in school would be utterly useless. When I was fifteen I knew the principal industries of the Ruhr Valley, the underlying causes of World War One and what Peig Sayers had for her dinner every day ... What I wanted to know when I was fifteen was the best way to chat up girls. That is what I still want to know. — Joseph O'Connor

It is not a matter of ends justifying means: but of the creation of new means and new ends. — Joseph O'Connor

Beliefs: Those things we hold to be true despite evidence to the contrary. — Joseph O'Connor

They had far more in common than either realised. One was born Catholic, the other Protestant. One was born Irish, the other British. But neither was the greatest difference between them. One was born rich and the other poor. — Joseph O'Connor

Truly the angels are come among us every day. Our difficulty is so often that in our vanity and worldliness we so utterly fail to recognise them for what they are. — Joseph O'Connor

He grew restless with Connemara and its bleak possibilities, its blasted bogscape and lunar rockiness, the grey desolation of everything around him, the rainy, acidulous smell of the air. The wind lashed in like a whip from the Atlantic and the trees grew at every angle to the ground except the perpendicular. He sat for hours at his cracked, filthy window watching them bend and warp in a gale; wondering when the fury might get too much and they would break in two or be torn from the earth. But they never broke. They just groaned and bowed low, and remained bowed after the storm had raged away. Stooped. Hunched. Twisted. Deformed: the serveants of a master who detested their devotion. — Joseph O'Connor

Dublin was turning into Disneyland with super-pubs, a Purgatory open till five in the morning. — Joseph O'Connor

That each man is the sum of his choices is nothing less than the truth. And each, perhaps, is also something else. — Joseph O'Connor

Any assemblage comprising human beings, any family, any party, any tribe, any nation, will bind itself together not by what it shares but ultimately by what it fears, which is often so much greater. Perhaps it abhors the outsider as camouflage for its own alarms; dreading what it would do to itself were the binding to fall asunder. — Joseph O'Connor

And if ever you wanted to quit your impatient girl truly, and our little story had to be stored away in a room that's only sometimes remembered, that's still a room I'd want, and I'd go there now and again, like some room in an old hotel on a seafront someplace where two sinners did something they shouldn't. Do you mind what I am telling you? It is the God's honest truth. Even if I never saw you or heard from you again, you'd already have been the miracle of my life. — Joseph O'Connor

They had no previous connection whatever with Connemara; but they saw connections where others who should have seen them simply looked the other way. — Joseph O'Connor

It was mankind and not the Almighty that had ordered the universe; only a man could look at an accident and call it a creation with Himself at the centre. — Joseph O'Connor

The English possessed as many words for stealing as the Irish had for seaweed or guilt. — Joseph O'Connor

(The short story) is a form that has all the power of the novel - some would say more - but none of the self-importance. — Joseph O'Connor

There is nothing worse than the ambitions of a talentless person. — Joseph O'Connor

The world's full of idiots, divas and assholes, mainly in Ireland. In Ireland, one cannot achieve anything if he is not a little wacky. That's a holy truth. It just simply cannot be otherwise. — Joseph O'Connor

Politics' the polite word for antediluvian prejudices, the rags put on by enmity and tribal resentment. — Joseph O'Connor

Love and freedom are such hideous words. So many cruelties have been done in their name. — Joseph O'Connor

I feel these days like a very large flamingo. No matter what way I turn, there is always a very large bill. — Joseph O'Connor

Everything is in the way the material is composed. — Joseph O'Connor

But as his father used to say when he had a few drinks taken, you couldn't expect bloody miracles when you were talking about God. — Joseph O'Connor

How the prisoner and the immigrant are treated by the government, how the poor are treated and those without influence: this is secretly how the government would like to treat us all. — Joseph O'Connor

We still tell each other that we are lucky to be alive, when our being alive has almost nothing to do with luck, but with geography, pigmentation, and international exchange rates. — Joseph O'Connor

Happy as a threaded needle — Joseph O'Connor