“…What use is the world to a man whose wife is a widow …”

*

“Sometimes I think my body has a mind of its own”

P.J. Galligan

*

“Communism is a form of Heavy Meitheal”

P.J. Galligan

*

“Taste is a commodity and the weapon of a particular class”

Bertolt Brecht

*

“Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers, who leap out, brandishing weapons,
and relieve the idle stroller of his conviction.”

Walter Benjamin ‘One-way Street’

*

“An té a thabharfas scéal chughat tabharfaidh sé dhá scéal uait”

“He who comes to you with a story will bring two away.”

*

“The powerful can’t tell stories: boasts are the opposite of stories, and any story, however mild, has to be fearless: the powerful today live nervously.”

“Stories are one way of sharing the belief that justice is imminent. And for such a belief, children, women and men will fight at a given moment with astounding ferocity. This is why tyrants fear storytelling: all stories somehow refer to the story of their fall.”

John Berger from ‘Ten Dispatches About Endurance in Face of Walls’ in Hold Everything Dear

*

“Tá iasg’s a bh-fairge ní’s fearr ná gabhadh a ríamh.”

“There is a fish in the sea better than ever was caught yet.”

*

“Oh Lord above, send down a dove and not a painted pigeon”

From Pat Speight

*

“There is a genius in starting things Goethe”

*

“Are you startin’? ”

M.C. Lumphammer

*

“By day and night, fancy electronic dishes are trained to the heavens. They are listening for smudged echoes of the moment of creation. They are listening for the ghost of a chance. They may help us make sense of who we are and where we came from, and, as a compassionate side effect, teach us that nothing is ever lost.”

Paddy McAloon, I trawl the MEGAHERTZ

*

“Folklore may prove to be, not a romantic and colourful ragbag of the discarded and outworn ideas of humanity, but one of the greatest wellsprings of the democratic attitudes that have in the past two centuries begun to make for a more equitable life for all mankind on this planet.”

Alan Lomax 1946

*

“Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.”

Friedrich Schiller

*

“A story takes shape only in the telling of it”

Jean Luc Godard Helas Pour Moi voiceover

*

“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.”

John Berger

*

“Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, probably the most extreme that ever existed.”

Walter Benjamin

*

“The moment you forget to use laughter, reason starts dying from suffocation. Irony is the irreplaceable oxygen of reason.”

Dario Fo

*

“The world is only a blue bag, knock a squeeze out of it while you can.”

The Tailor Buckley

*

“Irish placenames dry out when anglicised like twigs snapped off from the tree.”

Tim Robinson

*

“While the whole of the Irish landscape is like a manuscript, there is a danger that we are fast losing the skill to read it.”

Seamus Heaney

*

“Pay no attention to adverse criticism. The true artist has vision. The critic only has opinion.”

Jack B. Yeats to Louis Le Brocquy

*

“Opinion is a penknife. Knowledge is a dagger. Vision is a naked sword.”

John McLaughlin

*

“There’s no place on earth like the world.”

Brendan Behan

*

“As long as people have navels there will be lint.” 

Derek Smalls

*

“It’s easy to spot the terrorist. He’s the man with the small bomb.”

Brendan Behan

*

“There is no moral difference between a Stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. They both kill innocent people for political reasons.” 

Tony Benn

*

“Four years ago or maybe five, I was talking with Hidekazu Yoshida. We were on the train from Donaueschingen to Cologne. I mentioned the book by Herrigel called Zen in the Art of Archery; the melodramatic climax of this book concerns an archer’s hitting the bull’s eye though he did so in total darkness. Yoshida told me there was one thing the author failed to point out : that is, there lives in Japan at the present time a highly esteemed archer who has never yet been able to hit the bull’s eye even in broad daylight.”

John Cage Indeterminacy Part 2.

*

“The stars are matter, we’re matter – but it doesn’t matter.” 

Don Van Vliet

*

“Men let your wallets flop out / women open your purses / Cause a man or a woman without a big eyed bean from Venus / is suffering with the worstest of curses”

Captain Beefheart Big Eyed Beans From Venus

*

“The ideal mystery was the one you would read if the ending was missing.”

Raymond Chandler

*

“In order for you to partake in the American Dream you have to be asleep.”

George Carlin

*

“You can wake a sleeping man but you can never wake a man pretending to be asleep.”

Navajo saying

*

“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”

Nelson Mandela

*

“Disobediance, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue.”

Oscar Wilde The Soul of Man Under Socialism

*

“Tradition isn’t tending the ashes, it’s handing on the matches.”

Prof. Karl-Freidrich Boerne

*

“A tradition in itself has to be a growing thing. It’s not about “it’s got to change” – it’s got to grow all the time. You’ve got to grow, the music has to grow. To simply replay the past is like a stillborn event.”

Martin Hayes, East Clare Fiddle Player

*

“Paths are made by walking.”

Franz Kafka

*

“A fairy tale is not a text.”

Philip Pullman

*

“Money is not a culture” 

John Cassavetes

*

“Storytellers lose their identity and are open to the lives of other people” 

John Berger

*

“(In Fairytale) the miraculous is here the only possible guarantee that the immorality of reality has stopped.” 

André Jolles

*

“You’d always know when a story was about to unfold, because my father would take up the tongs and prod the fire.”

Paddy Heaney of Cadamstown, Co. Laois

*

“Sometimes folklore cuts straight to the heart of life. It illuminates history like a small pure flame burning in the darkest corner of memory.”

Vincent Woods

*

“Russell! How many times have I told you to stop kicking those leaves about?”

*

“Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast”

Oscar Wilde

*

“Germany lost World War 11 because Hitler was completely distracted by ill-fitting
clothing that he was constantly adjusting during the last two years of the war.”

George Carlin

*

“Sous le place la plage (Under the cobblestones, the beach)”

motto during the Paris Student Revolt , May 1968

*

“The revolution that is not joyous is the wrong revolution.”

Germaine Greer

*

“I have been memorising this room. In the future, in my memory, I shall live a great deal in this room.”

Garbo as Queen Christina

*

“Measure twice, cut once” 

Carpenter’s saying

*

“America is whitewashed all over by unmeaning names, the cast-off clothes of the country from which the emigrants came;
or named at a pinch from a psalm tune.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson English Traits

*

“Let’s not talk of the good old days but the bad new ones.”

Bertolt Brecht

*

“In order to be optimistic you have to be irrational” 

Joni Mitchell

*

“Let’s face the music and hum”

*

“Irish Music brings people to their senses” 

Joe Cooley

*

“I think you don’t believe half the lies I’m telling you”

Willie Clancy

*

“Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”

Walter Benjamin

*

“The times when the old cannot yet die and the new cannot yet emerge are the times of monsters.”

Antonio Gramsci

*

“Take rest; a field that has rested gives a beautiful crop” 

Ovid

*

“You’ll always have what you gave to love”

Beth Nielsen Chapman

*

“The Devil’s mammy had some very harsh things to say about him”

*

“I’d give up if I hadn’t” 

Samuel Beckett

*

“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied … but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”

John Berger (1926-2017)

*

“Hope is not a form of guarantee; it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.” 

John Berger

*

“Post-truth is Pre-fascism”

Historian Timothy Snyder

 *

“The product of too many useful things results in too many useless people” 

Karl Marx