Finnegans wake Quote by Wendy Doniger

I think [James] Joyce sometimes enjoyed misleading his readers. He said to me that history was like that parlor game where someone whispers something…

— Sylvia Beach

James Joyce's English was based on the rhythm of the Irish language. He wrote things that shocked English language speakers but he was thinking…

— Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh

“In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce's] characters, it must always be remembered that his…

— John Munro Woolsey

“If my last name were Bedient, I’d want to Irishize it and have you call me O’Bedient. Of course, just because you call me,…

— Jarod Kintz

“Like Jonathan Swift, Yeats was always a great renamer of his women, giving them mythical aliases or the names of Sir Walter Scott’s heroines,…

— Olivia Shakespear

“Do you know what Ireland is?' asked Stephen with cold violence. 'Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”

— James Joyce

I printed a list of Irish names from the Internet and my husband, Dave, saw Finley on the list. I really liked it but…

— Holly Marie Combs

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly…

— Roy Blount, Jr

My grandparents never understood why my mother Noreen chose such exotic names for her children: Damon and me. My granny insisted on calling my…

— Natascha McElhone

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.

— Winston Churchill

Irish is a leprechaun language.

— Sammy Wilson

We used to speak Irish - Gaelic Irish - around the dinner table, but over the years, we lost that.

— Genevieve O'Reilly