Quotes from 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.

For all things change, making way for each other

Ars est celare artem.

A grain of knowledge with the dawning of the day is a breakfast of the mind.

well merciful martyrs in heaven.. did you ever hear the likes of it?.. drinking whisky in a first class carriage and us on a pilgrimage to kneel at the feet of the holy father

I was at a wake the other night and every man jack was drunk - even the corpse.

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.

To say there is a time and a place for everything is trite, but the truth of the sentiment is not to be denied for all that; one could play the accordion while having a bath but probably nobody has ever tried to do that.

What is a sheep only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around and doing intricate convolutions inside the sheep? What else is it but that?

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

A bull may sometimes be a cow, a jackdaw may discourse, cocks have established from time to time the hypothesis that the egg is impeculiar to the she-bird, but a servant is at all times a servant notwithstanding.

Who had uttered these words? They had not frightened me. They were clearly audible to me yet I knew the did not ring out across the air like the chilling cough of the old man in the chair, They came from deep inside me, from my soul. Never before had I believed or suspected that I had a soul but just then I knew I had.

But the secret of it all-in-all,' continued the Sergeant, 'is the daily readings. Attend to your daily readings and your conscience will be as clear as a clean shirt on Sunday morning. I am a great believer in the daily readings.

Is it life?' he answered.'I would rather be without it' he said, ' for there is a queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, [...] It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like red-bars and foreign bacon.

No is a better word than Yes

If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflections what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man.

It has no size at all, the Sergeant explained, because there is no difference anywhere in it and we have no conception of the extent of its unchanging coequality.

In reply to an inquiry, it was explained that a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity.

You may have come on no bicycle, he said, but that does not say that you know everything.

I looked at my hand through it and saw nothing that was recognisable. Then I looked at several other things but saw nothing that I could clearly see. MacCruiskeen took it back with a smile at my puzzled eye. It magnifies to invisibility, he explained. It makes everything so big that there is room in the glass for only the smallest particle of it—not enough of it to make it different from any other thing that is dissimilar.

Ä°yi ki bir bedenim yok dedi iyi Peri. AteÅŸ edebileceÄŸi bir ÅŸey görür görmez tabancalar?na sar?lan ÅŸu kaç?k kabaday? varken kimse güvende deÄŸil.

Anything you do is a lie and nothing that happens to you is true.

I am, as you know, an Irish person and yield to gnomon in my admiration and respect for the old land.

There's no nonsense about the gun. It's quick, it's merciful, and it's clean.