Difficult time Quote by John Boyne

“There are only three kinds of Irishmen who can't understand women. Young men, old men and men of middle age.”

— Elizabeth Berg

“But it was always thus with Irishmen. Never, since the start of the world, has one of them taken a woman's sensible advice when…

— Eddie Lenihan

“A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn’t.”

— Kate Atkinson

“There's no sense to being Irish unless you know the world's going to break your heart.”

— Thomas Adcock

“...to be Irish is to know the world will break your heart before you are thirty.”

— Virginia Henley

“One was definitely Irish….The second man was unmistakably American. It wasn’t so much his tan or dark hair that gave him away as how…

— Rachael English

To be Irish today is the abandonment of shame and the younger people are moving it out and they're moving the fear away. They're…

— Malachy McCourt

“I was beginning to understand how the Irish mentality worked. The more foolish, illogical or surreal one's actions were perceived t be (and mine…

— Tony Hawks

“It was like the violence of the world he’d grown up in had embedded itself in him, taken root, and could never be fully…

— S.E. Jakes

“The behaviour of the English people I had run into was making it very difficult to nail down a theory that the reason my…

— Tony Hawks

“Ireland had clung to her youth, indeed to her childhood, longer and more tenaciously than any other country in Europe, resisting Change, Alteration, Reconstruction…

— Seán Ó Faoláin

“Well, they may not be civilized, but they are certainly confident--and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.”

— Thomas Cahill