Quotes from 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The meanest bloody thing in hell made this world.

There is nothing in this life so nice and so Gaelic as truly true Gaelic Gaels who speak in true Gaelic Gaelic about the truly Gaelic language.

Did you ever in your life,' he asked, 'mount a bicycle from the right?' 'I did not.' 'And why?' 'I do not know. I never thought about it.' He laughed at me indulgently. 'It is nearly an insoluble pancake,' he smiled, 'a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter.

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.

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?

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.

He is as crazy as bedamned, an incontestable character and a man of ungovernable inexactitudes.

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...

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.

We must invert our conception of repose and activity, he continued. We should not sleep to recover the energy expended when awake but rather wake occasionally to defecate the unwanted energy that sleep engenders. This might be done quickly – a five-mile race at full tilt around the town and then back to bed and the kingdom of the shadows.

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.

and you would be unutterably flibbergasted if you knew the number of stout bicycles that partake serenely of humanity.

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.

There are five [rules of wisdom] in all. 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.

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?

Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.

Biraz abart?l? olabilir belki, ama içten içe kendini b?rakt???n o gösteriÅŸ ve kibre küçük bir gönderme sadece.