Flann O'Brien: Man

Flann O'Brien was Irish writer. Explore interesting quotes on man.

Flann O'Brien: 60 quotes2 likes

“When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”

Flann O'Brien book At Swim-Two-Birds

Source: At Swim-Two-Birds

“When money's tight and is hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”

“My father…was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings.”

Flann O'Brien book The Third Policeman

The Third Policeman (1967)

“Is it life? I would rather be without it, for there is quare small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night's porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed jars and foreign bacon. Many a man has spent a hundred years trying to get the dimensions of it and when he understands it at last and entertains the certain pattern of it in his head, be the hokey he takes to his bed and dies. He dies like a poisoned sheepdog. There is nothing so dangerous you can't smoke it, nobody will give you tuppence halfpenny for the half of it, and it kills you in the wind-up. It is a quare contraption, very dangerous, a certain death-trap.”

Page 165
The Various Lives Of Keats And Chapman (2010)

“After a time," said old Mathers disregarding me, "I mercifully perceived the errors of my ways and the unhappy destination I would reach unless I mended them. I retired from the world in order to try to comprehend it and to find out why it becomes more unsavoury as the years accumulate on a man's body. What do you think I discovered at the end of my meditations?”

Flann O'Brien book The Third Policeman

The Third Policeman (1967)

“Do you know what I am going to tell you, he said with his wry mouth, a pint of plain is your only man.”

Source: "At Swim-Two-Birds" (1939), P. 22.