Quotes from Frank Delaney

The one joy that has kept me going through life has been the fact that stories unite us. To see you as you listen to me now, as you have always listened to me, is to know this: what I can believe, you can believe. And the way we all see our story-not just as Irish people but as flesh and blood individuals and not the way people tell us to see it-that's what we own, no matter who we are and where we come from.

We do well to remember dolphins. If a dolphin ails, then others come alongside and nudge him gently through the waters; because a dolphin must keep moving in order to keep breathing. We all have need of our dolphins alongside us from time to time.

The point about words is—the better you use them, the stronger is the thought that wears them.

Marriage is the gold standard of all relationships. It's the currency by which everything is valued.

The wises men tell us that everything, sooner or later, changes. And all change commences with a specific moment. We say to ourselves, "I wont do this again, I must become different." And we succeed -- eventually.

Stories are where you go to look for the truth of your own life.

It's very healing,' he said, 'to tell yourself your own story as though you were reciting a myth.

Should; shouldn't; ought; oughtn't—the enemies of contentment.

Any attempt to ease guilt by justification is false. That the crimes of another appease none of one's own offenses. That, if one is being truthful, the greater pain is that of the offender. I know now that I would much rather be a victim of violence than a perpetrator

I told you that day: a pair of idiots. I thought she was leading you around by the nose--or some other organ.

But can you make someone feel the world all around loves them? Can you make them feel the rain is for cooling them, the wind is for drying them, the sun is for warming them?

fair is a body pigment, that's all it is.

Stick a lighted candle up your backside to give yourself that inner glow.

we must all share in each other's visions if the world is to become civilized.

Guns discommode me. Their facility alarms me. Point and kill. Ruin someone's life. Remove at a finger pull deeply loved people, as important in their spheres as the sun in the sky. The very weight of a gun disturbs me-an insolent object, insisting on its own importance.

Kitchens are for conversation. They're not just for cooking; they're for conversations.

For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war - bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges.

First a piece of Irish wisdom: you should always listen to a bookie. For they have a saying, 'Money tells a good story,' and somewhere in their odds is a kind of science-fiction existentialism that decrees that we, the people, know everything. In other words, betting patterns often make for good, unconscious soothsaying.

To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.

'The Great Gatsby,' by F. Scott Fitzgerald, remains the most perfect novel that has ever come out of the United States. Everything in the book moves as it should, in the manner of a piece by Bach or Mozart.

We all belong to an ancient identity. Stories are the rivers that take us there.

I'd have to struggle to find a subject in which I can't get some kind of interested pulse started.

If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.