Joseph O'Connor > Quotes

“Love and freedom are such hideous words. So many cruelties have been done in their name.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“It is not a matter of ends justifying means: but of the creation of new means and new ends.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“Everything is in the way the material is composed.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“They had no previous connection whatever with Connemara; but they saw connections where others who should have seen them simply looked the other way.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“They had far more in common than either realised. One was born Catholic, the other Protestant. One was born Irish, the other British. But neither was the greatest difference between them. One was born rich and the other poor.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“Any assemblage comprising human beings, any family, any party, any tribe, any nation, will bind itself together not by what it shares but ultimately by what it fears, which is often so much greater. Perhaps it abhors the outsider as camouflage for its own alarms; dreading what it would do to itself were the binding to fall asunder.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“There is nothing worse than the ambitions of a talentless person.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Cowboys & Indians

“That each man is the sum of his choices is nothing less than the truth. And each, perhaps, is also something else.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“But why would they do that? What is to be asked? He was a man who sees into things -- very ordinary things. A hat left on the floor of a café in Kingstown, a proverb overheard, an old fisherman mending a net: these, for him, were a kind of incitement. There are no answers other than that. He was not like the rest of us. Not even like himself. His imagination, or soul, or whatever province of his mind was hungry for the sustaining rain of the world, would soak in the storms of his own haunted strangeness, and the berries would bloom, and they were what they were, and if the tendrils were peculiar, and some of them wild, the fruits were so shockingly luscious and potent that the thirsty were willing to savour the bitter for the sake of the concomitant sweet. He needed the very ordinary. He was a beautiful man. What more than this need be said? The sort of man who makes you think the movement of foliage might be causing the breeze.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Ghost Light

“How the prisoner and the immigrant are treated by the government, how the poor are treated and those without influence: this is secretly how the government would like to treat us all.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“The world's full of idiots, divas and assholes, mainly in Ireland. In Ireland, one cannot achieve anything if he is not a little wacky. That's a holy truth. It just simply cannot be otherwise.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Cowboys & Indians

“Most things between a woman and a man cannot be understood, it's why people invented love poems, a way of filling in the silence.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Shadowplay

“Happy as a threaded needle”
― Joseph O'Connor, Ghost Light

“And if ever you wanted to quit your impatient girl truly, and our little story had to be stored away in a room that's only sometimes remembered, that's still a room I'd want, and I'd go there now and again, like some room in an old hotel on a seafront someplace where two sinners did something they shouldn't. Do you mind what I am telling you? It is the God's honest truth. Even if I never saw you or heard from you again, you'd already have been the miracle of my life.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Ghost Light

“The English possessed as many words for stealing as the Irish had for seaweed or guilt.”
― Joseph O'Connor

“There's good people of every persuasion, and there's 24-carat bastards.”
― Joseph O'Connor

“have come to see that neutrality is the most extremist stance of all; without it, no tyranny can flourish.”
― Joseph O'Connor, My Father's House

“Harmony is an everyday, achievable miracle. Imagine having been the first person to think of it, to attempt it with another. I shall sing this. You sing that. Something greater than I or you will result.”
― Joseph O'Connor, My Father's House

“Politics' the polite word for antediluvian prejudices, the rags put on by enmity and tribal resentment.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“...but as his father used to say when he had a few drinks taken, you couldn't expect bloody miracles when you were talking about God.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“It was mankind and not the Almighty that had ordered the universe; only a man could look at an accident and call it a creation with Himself at the centre.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“all of our trials are caused by restlessness, the refusal to accept the fact that limitations exist”
― Joseph O Connor

“the country of the poor can be abandoned no longer. For i dread what is growing in that country now. I fear we shall reap a venomous crop”
― Joseph O Connor

“I saw all political systems as more or less the same, forms of foolishness, the prattling of apes, designed to keep the lesser chimps down.”
― Joseph O'Connor, My Father's House

“Ponekad, ljubav je i kada one koje volimo pustimo da
odu.”
― Joseph O'Connor

“Confronting authority, one has only two choices: Surrender, or try to confuse it.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Shadowplay

“A religiously minded kid will often be good at lying awake all night because you need an imagination if you're going to believe.”
― Joseph O'Connor, My Father's House

“It was simply the way with Harry, like waiting for sunrise. But once you made clear that you wouldn't be going to bed with him, he'd look oddly relieved and calm down. And the matter once raised would not be revisited, I will say that for him. He didn't make a nuisance of himself. Funny old skellum. Never dull. There are men whom it is important not to take the slightest notice of when they're talking, if it's after ten o'clock at night and they've had a glass of beer. Harry was one such mammal.

They really and truly don't mean to be idiots. But it's like a Roman Catholic person not wanting to feel guilt. Might as well ask water to run uphill. Except that might conceivably be contrived. With a pump.

Once, he asked my sister to run away with him, to Rotterdam I think it was. She said no and he asked my brother. That was the most important thing to understand about Harry. Essentially, what he wanted--darling, who wouldn't--was someone to run away with him to Rotterdam.

It's what all of us want, isn't it? Of course, nobody gets it. Probably not even those misfortunates who are in Rotterdam already. One wonders where they want to run away to. Crouch End?”
― Joseph O'Connor, Shadowplay

“Life schools you the way no catechism will.”
― Joseph O'Connor, My Father's House

“Truly the angels are come among us every day. Our difficulty is so often that in our vanity and worldliness we so utterly fail to recognise them for what they are.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star Of The Sea