Morgan Llywelyn Quotes

I'm Irish!...When I feel well I feel better than anyone, when I am in pain I yell at the top of my lungs, and when I am dead I shall be deader than anybody.

She enjoys rain for its wetness, winter for its cold, summer for its heat. She loves rainbows as much for fading as for their brilliance. It is easy for her, she opens her heart and accepts everything.

He took her into his arms again, using all his strength to be gentle, and let his lips touch hers so lightly he could hardly feel it.

Bodies wear out to remind us they are temporary, and force us to spend more thought on our spirits

We’re born alone and we die alone, I accept that. But why, God, do we have to be alone in the middle?

There is a cruelty that lurks in some men’s souls which is only released when they have other men in their power.

There is no disgrace in peace. There can never be dishonor in peace.

The harmony that holds the stars on their courses and the flesh on our bones resonates through all creation. Every sound contains its echo. Before there was humankind, or even forest, there was sound. Sound spread from the source in great circles like those formed when a stone is dropped in a pool. We follow waves of sound from life to life. A dying man’s ears will hear long after his eyes are blind. He hears the sound that leads him to his next life as the Source of All being plucks the harp of creation.

Hating is easy. It's loving that's hard

If you would have peace, genuine peace, you must accept all the aspects of your personality and learn to be comfortable with them.

We never fully appreciate today until tomorrow.

In the long run, the fall of one civilization is very much like the fall of another. Only the land remains.

Even her radiant beauty seemed to dim as he thought of the way she had fooled him.

Questions stripped away the platitudes and undermined the verities that provided a sheltered, nursery existence for people who did not want to think. Questions were the obligation of the intellect.

As the sun is to the earth, so Honour is to a man. without it, he will not flourish. All else may fail you, but honour is the treasure no one can take from you, the shield no one can penetrate unless you let them. Honour is beautiful and clean. Honour is sacred.

Feet, she thought. Sea legs. When you pass the last spit of land and commit to the ocean, you are taking a step into the infinite and might set your foot down anywhere.

Everything hurts, Fergal. All the time. Start with that and life won't be able to disappoint you.

I walk on the surface of a shifting bog. I have to grab for whatever I can find that is solid.

The achievements and discoveries of a great but dying society can bring light to a young and growing one.

No'm he aint ill. Not unless laziness is a sickness. If it is, I'd say he's close to dying tomorrow.

We have freedom of the press; I think it’s guaranteed in the Constitution or something.”   The

At one time the Irish had been forbidden by English law to educate their children, to own a horse worth more than five pounds, to play the Irish pipes, to wear the color green… the list went on and on. Most of the oppressive statutes were no longer enforced, but the shamed submission they had engendered remained.

Men who have died in battle are rarely good to look upon. No matter how splendid their appearance at the apex of heroism, when the soul has fled it takes all grace and beauty with it. Bowels empty, mouths gape, bellies swell, dead eyes gleam fish-belly white. Nothing visible remains of glory. In the tents of death all men belong to the same tribe.

Although Erc was bitterly disappointed, there was another route to prestige. He possessed gifts of the mind sufficient to gain admittance to the order of Druids, the intellectual class of Celtic society. Members of the order were not practitioners of a specific religion, nor were they priests in the Christian sense of the word. The Greeks were more nearly correct by describing Druids as poet-philosophers.

Grace O'Malley is a crafty devil.

Io non ci ho mai tenuto a diventare un capo" rispose Grania. "Sono sempre andata dove volevo andare, e quando mi guardavo indietro vedevo che gli altri mi stavano seguendo.

The longing and impatience of boyhood give way to the longing and discontent of manhood, and the future you anticipate is still just around the corner.

Let me tell you something about women, Tigernan,” Ruari offered, stretching his legs and holding up his empty ale bowl to attract the innkeeper’s attention. “I’ve given a bit of thought to them, having lived more years than you. Women are something a man requires, as necessary as air to breathe and ale to drink. I cannot boast of understanding them, mind you, but I suspect nature designed them for a specific purpose, and it would be a mistake to try to change them. “Women render men an invaluable service that may not at first be apparent. They are born to be responsible, to caretake. It is in them to probe their men as they would examine an old cloak, looking for holes that could let the wind through. Women understand survival better than we do, I think. They will nag and probe and provoke until they find a lowered defense, even the smallest hole, then they poke their fingers through and shout, ‘Aha!’ “In this way they force their men to keep their cloaks mended and their weapons in repair, and ultimately this helps them survive. With a woman treading on his heels a man must stay alert and in the proper frame of mind to go out and slay dragons. Never provoke a quarrel with a man who has just had his flaws pointed out to him by some woman.

But my mind keeps on thinking,” Connla offered hopefully. “As long as I am thinking, I must be alive.”  The ant pondered this. “There are many who never think, yet are considered to be alive,” it said.  “Then what is ‘being alive’?

The old chieftain’s eyes were bleak. “Is that all you have left to offer me from your bag of tricks, druid? Hope?”  “Hope is priceless,” Coran assured him.  “Hope is what’s left at the bottom of the bag,” Hundred Battles said. “Like lint.

The Romans did not like kings. We needed them, however. Over many generations we had evolved the pattern of living that best suited Celtic natures. Kings led noble warriors in battle that defined tribal territory and gave men a shape for their pride. Less aggressive common people farmed the land and did the labor of the tribe. Druids were responsible for the intangible essentials upon which all else depended. Man and Earth and Otherworld were thus held in balance----until the coming of Caesar, who wanted to destroy our warriors and our druids so he could make the rest of us his slaves.

But I once had a friend who was a cat.' 'Cats are for catching rats.' 'You say that because you think like a farmer with a store of grain to protect. But I tell you cats are for cats, just as Dinas said the stars are stars. Their purpose is simply to be, Pelemos. Cats and stars don’t belong to us.

Concealed within the stones are frozen fires. Borne on vast waves of polychrome gas that attracted, discarded, formed, and reformed patterns of infinite complexity, the living sparks had taken their allotted places. They were burning before the beginning. They will burn after the end. Their fire is impervious to time. Time is a human concept. Creation is on a different scale. Every spark was a syllable spoken into silence, a miniscule portion of the great Word that became a roar of limitless power and exploded to create a universe. From chaos, cosmos.

Elizabeth now calls herself the Supreme Governor of the Church of Ireland - can you believe such a joke? As if God reached down and put his hand on her head, anointing her? A woman?" He added this last with special emphasis, as if it were the worst crime charged to Elizabeth Tudor's name.

I want something for myself, Grania was thinking, staring at her folded and clenched hands.

The power that created me would not have given me such a capacity for feeling pleasure if I weren't meant to use it, Evleen whispered to the man who sat rapt beneath her touch. Your religion wants dominion over our bodies because sex is the one ecstasy they can't control, and they are threatened by any rapture other than that they offer.

I have done what mourning I had to do already; I have no desire to give over more days of my life to satisfy conventions that are not mine. I am of the old religion, Grania; we do not believe in death. And so we do not allow it to triumph over life and twist and torture the living. There is...lifework to be done here.

Men do not believe what they cannot see, and they will not see what they do not believe.

On the eighteenth of February John A. Costello, a former attorney general in the Cosgrave administration, was named as taoiseach. To him fell the task of forming the first coalition government in the history of the state.

Like the river, we sparkle more in sunshine, but our strength comes from the rain’?

powerful it can starve a whole continent. You wield the greatest aggregate of material force ever concentrated in the hands of one power; and, while canting about your championship of small nations, you use it to crush out liberty in ours. We are a small people with a population dwindling without cessation under your rule. Nevertheless, we accept your challenge and will fight you with the same determination, with the same resolve, as the American States, north and south, put into their fight for freedom against your empire.”4

exactly, ‘I think a curse should rest on me—because I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment—and yet—I can’t help it—I enjoy every second of it.

The Irish loved gossip even more than funerals.

Going for a little journey around the inside of my head,

element in men…in some men…that requires a battle. Combat is how they define themselves, and when such men rise to leadership they can indulge their passion. If they didn’t have this war, they would manufacture another one.

in 1800 Great Britain subsumed Ireland through the Act of Union, abolishing the Irish parliament, and the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland came into being.

The Rising was funded largely by American sympathizers acting through the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood.

plenipotentiary.

The air was liquid spice.

In 1912 Henry had summed up the situation in the last article he wrote while working for the Limerick Leader: “Ireland has no strong voice to demand justice for her people in Westminster or anywhere else. Frustrated on every level, the ordinary Irish man and woman feels the pressure mounting inexorably. Living

Constance, Countess Markievicz,

Oscar Wilde once said, ‘Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion

And Constance Markievicz had counseled women, “Take up your responsibilities and be prepared to go your own way depending for safety on your own courage, your own truth and your own common sense.” Ursula

Dalton, James Emmet (1998–1978): Former major in the British Army; director of training for the IRA in 1921; aide and advisor to Michael Collins; in charge of the bombardment of the Four Courts; briefly clerk of Seanad Éireann; later, made a film career in Hollywood and London. Deasy,

The longer one hates the deeper it goes. Hatred is passed on to the children and the children’s children until it becomes a religion in itself.

Will so many uncushioned facts piled upon one another eventually erect an emotional wall between the event and the observer, so that people no longer feel an individual responsibility?

How do you strike fire without flint?” Connla wanted to know.  “The sun has no flints,” Blathine replied. “Yet each day it brings fire to warm the earth.”  Shaking his head ruefully, Connla said, “I see I will get no simple answers from you.”  “There are no simple answers!” she chortled. “How quickly you are learning!

Why did you not die?”  He searched his memory, trying to find an answer for her. “When the sword bit through my neck, I thought surely I was dead. Then—then a sort of strength seemed to come to me, from somewhere. And I found myself having a strange conversation with an ant about life and death. The ant claimed one does not die as long as one is being remembered—”  “—and loved,” Blathine finished for him. “That is how it is with mortals, Finvarra! I see what has happened here. Someone in the world from which I brought Connla Fiery Hair is still thinking about him and loving him.

He had seen lakes and rivers, but Connla had never seen an ocean, and its very size was beyond his comprehension.  “Where does it end?” he asked Blathine.  “It does not end. The ocean is everything. All the land is merely an interruption in the sea.”  Her words made no sense; such things could not be possible.

As if it had heard his thoughts, the dolphin said, “You love life, that is why you sought to flee from death to a place where there is no death. If you love life, you must keep worshipping the god of life with your body, which means you must fight to stay alive even when it looks hopeless. Give up, and life will turn its back on you.