Irish Playwright Quotes

George Bernard Shaw

Samuel Beckett

William Butler Yeats

Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany

Augusta, Lady Gregory

Martin McDonagh

Brendan Behan

Those whom we called brutes had their revenge when Darwin showed us that they were our cousins.

George Bernard Shaw

An Irishman I am, begora! With a heart and a spirit on
me not crushed be a hundred years of oppression. I'll be getting me
shillelagh out next, wait'll you see.

Martin McDonagh

The ordinariness of people is what is often extraordinary.

Find earth where grows no weed, and you may find a heart wherein no error grows.

James Sheridan Knowles

The reconciling grave swallows distinction first, that made us foes; there all lie down in peace together.

Thomas Southerne

A place in thy memory, dearest,
Is all that I claim;
To pause and look back when thou hearest
The sound of my name.

I have sometimes believed that I could see shadows spread under people's eyes when they were being frantically bored. I have seen faces age and sag under the onslaught of amiable extroversion.

Cheerfulness, sir, is the principal ingredient in the composition of health.

But if I'm content with a little, Enough is as good as a feast.

Isaac Bickerstaffe

It was the hour when gauze-winged insects are born that only live for a day.

Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany

To marry the Irish is to look for poverty.

When I was four I thought everything in TV was just TV, then I was five and Ma unlied about lots of it being pictures of real and Outside being totally real. Now I'm in Outside but it turns out lots of it isn't real at all.

Beauty hath no lustre save when it gleameth through the crystal web that purity's fine fingers weave for it.

Charles Maturin

It has been explained to me that toys are packaged in shards, to be assembled by the middle-aged and butter-fingered, because this makes it easier for the shippers.... If they had to spend hours and hours putting handlebars onto bicycles... they would repent their ways and deliver something that looked like a rocking horse and not like the result of a small street accident.

Drink a health to the wonders of the western world, the pirates, preachers, poteen-makers, with the jobbing jockies; parching peelers, and the juries fill their stomachs selling judgments of the English law.

John Millington Synge

The wide wonder of Broadway is disconsolate in the daytime; but gaudily glorious at night, with a milling crowd filling sidewalk and roadway, silent, going up, going down, between upstanding banks of brilliant lights, each building braided and embossed with glowing, many-coloured bulbs of man-rayed luminance. A glowing valley of the shadow of life. The strolling crowd went slowly by through the kinematically divine thoroughfare of New York.

Do not despair. Remember there is no triangle, however obtuse, but the circumference of some circle passes through its wretched vertices.

Tis a question whether adversity or prosperity makes the most poets.

George Farquhar

All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
One time it was a woman's face, or worse--
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;
Now nothing but comes readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil.

William Butler Yeats

My husband was in the war of the Crimea. It is terrible the hardships he went through‚ to be two months without going into a house‚ under the snow in trenches. And no food to get‚ maybe a biscuit in the day. And there was enough food there‚ he said‚ to feed all Ireland; but bad management‚ they could not get it.

Augusta, Lady Gregory