Maddy

“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?"

"That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant.

I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

“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 are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

“Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

“Are you completely doubtless that you are nameless?’ he asked.

‘Positively certain.’

‘Would it be Mick Barry?’

‘No.’

‘Charlemagne O’Keeffe?’

‘No.’

‘Sir Justin Sens?’

‘Not that.’

‘Kimberley?’

‘No.’

‘Bernard Fann?’

‘No.’

‘Joseph Poe or Nolan?’

‘No.’

‘One of the Garvins of or the Moynihans?’

‘Not them.’

‘Rosencranz O’Dowd?’

‘No.’

‘Would it be O’Benson?’

‘Not O’Benson.’

‘The Quigleys, the Mulrooneys or the Hounimen?’

‘No’

‘The Hardimen or the Merrimen?’

‘Not them,’

‘Peter Dundy?’

‘No.’

‘Scrutch?’

‘No.’

‘Lord Brad?’

‘Not him.’

‘The O’Growneys, the O’Roartys or the Finnehys?

‘No.’

‘This is an amazing piece of denial and denunciation’ he said (…) ‘An astonishing parade of nullity’; he added.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman