Irish Language Quotes & Sayings

H. L Mencken's Dictionary of the American Language supplies a long list of slang terms for being drunk, but the Irish are no slouches, either. They're spannered, rat-arsed, cabbaged, and hammered; ruined, legless, scorched, and blottoed; or simply trolleyed or sloshed. In Kerry, you're said to be flamin'; in Waterford, you're in the horrors; and in Cavan, you've gone baloobas, a tough one to wrap your tongue around if you ARE baloobas. In Donegal, you're steamin', while the afflicted in Limerick are out of their tree. — Bill Barich

Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today. — Diane Wakoski

The phrase comes to him before the emotion; but we must add that he is nevertheless a born writer, a man who detests meals, servants, ease, respectability or anything that gets between him and his art; who has kept his freedom when most of his contemporaries have long ago lost theirs; who is ashamed of nothing but being ashamed; who says whatever he has it in his mind to say, and has taught himself an accent, a cadence, indeed a language, for saying it in which, though they are not English, but Irish, will give him his place among the lesser immortals of our tongue. — Virginia Woolf

I am Irish by race but the English have condemned me to talk the language of Shakespeare. — Oscar Wilde

Irish and English are so widely separated in their mode of expression that nothing like a literal rendering from one language to the other is possible. — Robin Flower

He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands. — Alexander McCall Smith

He said you have to be on the side of the losers, the people with bad lungs. You have to be with those who are homesick and can't breathe very well in Ireland. He said it makes no sense to hold a stone in your hand. A lot more people would be homeless if you speak the killer language. He said Ireland has more than one story. We are the German-Irish story. We are the English-Irish story, too. My father has one soft foot and one hard foot, one good ear and one bad ear, and we have one Irish foot and one German foot and a right arm in English. We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German raisins. We are the brack people and we don't have just one language and one history. We sleep in German and we dream in Irish. We laugh in Irish and we cry in German. We are silent in German and we speak in English. We are the speckled people. — Hugo Hamilton

Although the Irish language is connected with the many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual decline of the Irish language. — Daniel O'Connell

There have been many definitions of hell, but for the English the best definition is that it is the place where the Germans are the police, the Swedish are the comedians, the Italians are the defense force, Frenchmen dig the roads, the Belgians are the pop singers, the Spanish run the railways, the Turks cook the food, the Irish are the waiters, the Greeks run the government, and the common language is Dutch. — David Frost

It is a most disgraceful shame the way in which Irishmen are brought up. They are ashamed of their language, institutions, and of everything Irish. — Douglas Hyde

Yes, it is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception - a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to ... inevitabilities. — Brian Friel

The English imposed their language on Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and they weren't terribly nice about it. — Howard Tomb

Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it. — Conor Cruise O'Brien

I fancy that the Irish language must have 57 different words for 'rain', in the same way that Inuit has for 'snow'. If, in reality, this is not the case, then I'm really glad I've never bothered to learn Irish'. — Stephen Price

I knew lots of Irish ladies in my life who would say daft things and then would just say something incredibly truthful in a very simple way with simple language - a few well chosen words that would take an intellectual five minutes to express. I like that. — Steve Coogan

I've got many different voices - I have a Southern girl, an Irish girl. I have a gibberish language that you'd have to decipher. I guess I try to never take myself too seriously. — Rachel Miner

Even if I did speak Irish, I'd always be considered an outsider here, wouldn't I? I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me, won't it? The private core will always be ... hermetic, won't it? — Brian Friel

And in spite of everything, Ireland remains the brain of the Kingdom. The English, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget
the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature. — James Joyce

Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity. — John McGahern

Up and down' is Irish for anything at all
from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'. — Anne Enright

Irish is a leprechaun language. — Sammy Wilson

'Ulysses' is the greatest anti-racist text in the English language, and it challenges right from the beginning the vicious racism which lies near the foundations of the Irish Free State and of the Irish republic. — Tom Paulin

I always gravitate towards anything from Ireland. With Irish lit, I love the use of language, but also in many instances, the Irish writers are writing about people and circumstances that I can relate to. — Daniel Woodrell

I believe that the interior life is the same for all of us. And because they're steeped in faith, Irish-American Catholics are a people who have a language for the examined life. — Alice McDermott

If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content torecognize myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one. — James Joyce

In the mid-nineteenth century, Jeremiah Curtin, an Irish-American who had learned Irish, traveled throughout the Irish-speaking enclaves in Connacht and discovered hundreds of previously unrecorded stories. He recorded them in their original language and greatly advanced the study of Irish folklore. At — Ryan Hackney

Ah, I feel a sadness on me, Dane. That's how the Irish people say it. In their language, you can't say, "I am sad," or "I am happy". They understood what we English have long forgot. We're not our sadness. We're not our happiness or our pain but our language hypnotizes us and traps us in little labelled boxes. — Grant Morrison

Not to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in a better future. It is to cut oneself off from ways of being at home. If we regard self-understanding, mutual understanding, imaginative enhancement, cultural diversity and a tolerant political atmosphereas a desirable attainments, we should remember that a knowledge of the Irish language is an essential element in their realisation. — Seamus Heaney

Once in my childhood I had been eager to learn Irish; I thought to get leave to take lessons from an old Scripture-reader who spent a part of his time in the parish of Killinane, teaching such scholars as he could find to read their own language in the hope that they might turn to the only book then being printed in Irish, the Bible. — Lady Gregory

With our gift for language and willingness to stand up and be counted, as well as heaps of charm and charisma, we Irish have long been an integral part of American political life. — Rashers Tierney

It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once How they mangle it and revere it. How they color even their silences. — Colum McCann

James Joyce's English was based on the rhythm of the Irish language. He wrote things that shocked English language speakers but he was thinking in Gaelic. I've sung songs that if they were in English, would have been banned too. The psyche of the Irish language is completely different to the English-speaking world. — Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh

When the Irish nun said to me, "Speak your name loud and clear so that all the boys and girls can hear you," she was asking me to use language publicly, with strangers. That's the appropriate instruction for a teacher to give. If she were to say to me, "We are going to speak now in Spanish, just like you do at home. You can whisper anything you want to me, and I am going to call you by a nickname, just like your mother does," that would be inappropriate. Intimacy is not what classrooms are about. — Richard Rodriguez

Second-generation Hispanics marry non-Hispanics at a higher rate than second-generation Irish or Italians. Second-generation Hispanics' English language capability rates are higher than previous immigrant groups'. — Jeb Bush

Somebody once said that the Irish derived the greatest benefit from the English language. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter, they fling it at the sky like paint pots full of rainbow colors. — Malachy McCourt

She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father's words, and her mother's, and her sister's. Utterly unlike Onnen's otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn't there. — Nicola Griffith

There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting. — John Millington Synge

I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be. — Kenneth Branagh