Frank Delaney > Quotes

“Every pain is a lesson.”
― Frank Delaney, The Matchmaker of Kenmare

“Do you know what the difference is between Friendship and Love? Friendship is the photograph, Love is the oil painting.”
― Frank Delaney, The Matchmaker of Kenmare

“We Irish prefer embroideries to plain cloth. To us Irish, memory is a canvas--stretched, primed, and ready for painting on. We love the "story" part of the word "history," and we love it trimmed out with color and drama, ribbons and bows. Listen to our tunes, observe a Celtic scroll: we always decorate our essence.”
― Frank Delaney, Tipperary

“Start with the difficult and when it gets easy, everything else is easier.”
― Frank Delaney, The Matchmaker of Kenmare

“When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.”
― Frank Delaney, Ireland

“The difference between a friend and an enemy is friendliness.”
― Frank Delaney, The Matchmaker of Kenmare

“I never met a librarian worth his or her salt who didn't perceive my passion for books.”
― Frank Delaney

“Find your soul and you'll live. Lose your soul and you'll die.”
― Frank Delaney, Shannon

“To have come from Ireland no matter how long ago is to be of Ireland in some part forever.”
― Frank Delaney

“What I told you tonight - it isn't my story alone. It belongs to every Irish person living and dead. And every Irish person living and dead belongs to it. And to all the story of Ireland; blood and bones, legends, guns and dreams, Catholics, Protestants, England, horses and poets and lovers.”
― Frank Delaney, Ireland

“The human face does not always reflect the beauty that may repose in the soul.”
― Frank Delaney, Shannon

“Marriage is very important. Marrying a girl is the most important thing a man can do. Never mind business or politics or sport or any of that, there's nothing so vital to the world as a man marrying a woman. That's where we get our children from, that's how the human race goes forward. And if it's too late for children, there's the companionship of a safe and trusted person.”
― Frank Delaney, The Matchmaker of Kenmare

“The one joy that has kept me going through life has been the fact that stories unite us. To see you as you listen to me now, as you have always listened to me, is to know this: what I can believe, you can believe. And the way we all see our story-not just as Irish people but as flesh and blood individuals and not the way people tell us to see it-that's what we own, no matter who we are and where we come from.”
― Frank Delaney, Ireland

“I believe the world of the spirit is in general greatly neglected and not at all served by the practice of faith as we know it, because religion isn't individual enough.”
― Frank Delaney, Ireland

“We do well to remember dolphins. If a dolphin ails, then others come alongside and nudge him gently through the waters; because a dolphin must keep moving in order to keep breathing. We all have need of our dolphins alongside us from time to time.”
― Frank Delaney, Ireland

“The point about words is—the better you use them, the stronger is the thought that wears them.”
― Frank Delaney, Ireland

“Marriage is the gold standard of all relationships. It's the currency by which everything is valued.”
― Frank Delaney, The Matchmaker of Kenmare

“The wises men tell us that everything, sooner or later, changes. And all change commences with a specific moment. We say to ourselves, "I wont do this again, I must become different." And we succeed -- eventually.”
― Frank Delaney, Ireland

“Stories are where you go to look for the truth of your own life.”
― Frank Delaney, The Last Storyteller

“Any attempt to ease guilt by justification is false. That the crimes of another appease none of one's own offenses. That, if one is being truthful, the greater pain is that of the offender. I know now that I would much rather be a victim of violence than a perpetrator”
― Frank Delaney, The Last Storyteller

“Should; shouldn't; ought; oughtn't—the enemies of contentment.”
― Frank Delaney, Ireland

“It's very healing,' he said, 'to tell yourself your own story as though you were reciting a myth.”
― Frank Delaney, The Matchmaker of Kenmare

“...fair is a body pigment, that's all it is.”
― Frank Delaney, Ireland

“And he had other assets; one of them -- you'll be surprised at this -- was sin...Whatever it was, Patrick said how it weighed on him. He also exploited it -- because it enabled him to meet people on an equal footing. He was able to say, "Look, I'm not above you. I have my faults, too. I've done terrible things." Just because someone had once sinned, he said, didn't mean they were bad through and through. And that was part of his work in life -- to show that people might sin and still go on to live good lives.”
― Frank Delaney, Ireland

“But can you make someone feel the world all around loves them? Can you make them feel the rain is for cooling them, the wind is for drying them, the sun is for warming them?”
― Frank Delaney, Ireland

“I told you that day: a pair of idiots. I thought she was leading you around by the nose--or some other organ.”
― Frank Delaney, The Matchmaker of Kenmare

“Beneath its broad surface, storytelling should always work hard to say more than it seems to.”
― Frank Delaney, Ireland

“Stick a lighted candle up your backside to give yourself that inner glow.”
― Frank Delaney, The Matchmaker of Kenmare

“Draped across an armchair lay his famous long black coat, empty now, and hollow with missing him.”
― Frank Delaney, The Last Storyteller

“Getting up, going to bed, preparing food, eating food--we futile creatures must struggle all the time. Nothing that we need comes to us; we must reach for everything.”
― Frank Delaney, The Last Storyteller