16 quotes
Do you know what I am going to tell you, he said with his wry mouth, a pint of plain is your only man.
At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.
The Hair of the Dogma (1977)
Some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their houses.
The Best of Myles (1968)
"Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable."
The Third Policeman (1967)
"Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder."
The Dalkey archive (1964)
"Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country."
The Best of Myles (1968)
"Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places."
The Third Policeman (1967)
"You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?"
The Third Policeman (1967)
It cannot be too often repeated that I am not for sale. I was bought in 1921 and the transaction was final and conclusive.
The Best of Myles (1968)
The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at a crossroads.
The Hair of the Dogma (1977)
One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.
At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
"I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind."
At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
"I am completely half afraid to think."
The Third Policeman (1967)
"My father...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings."
The Third Policeman (1967)
If Irish were to die completely, the standard of English here, both in the spoken and written word, would sink to a level probably as low as that obtaining in England and it would stop there only because it could go no lower.
The Best of Myles (1968)
"The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles."
The Third Policeman (1967)