Happy St Patrick's Day !
A friend sent along this message this morning, and we share with you:

On Being Irish

• “I've never seen a nation more quick at finding joy in a sad situation than the Irish at a funeral.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Vocation of a Gadfly

• “May those who love us, love us;
And for those who don't love us,
May God turn their hearts;
And if He doesn't turn their hearts,
May He turn their ankles,
So we will know them by their limping.”
― Old Irish Curse

• “An Irish good-bye is when you leave a party or gathering without telling anyone.”

“More guilt, guilt, guilt. That's the Irish condition.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground

• “I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.”
― Iris Murdoch

• “We survive. We're Irish. We have the souls of poets. We love our misery, we delight in the beauty of strange places and dark places in our hearts.”

― Eilis Flynn, Wear Black

• “There's no sense to being Irish unless you know the world's going to break your heart.”
― Thomas Adcock

• “Damn it all, MacMurrough, are you telling me you are an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort?’
‘If you mean am I Irish, the answer is yes.”
― Jamie O'Neill, At Swim, Two Boys

• "It's a curious race, the Irish"
- Oscar Wilde

• “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”
― W.B. Yeats

• “That’s the Irish People all over - they treat a serious thing as a joke and a joke as a serious thing.”
― Seán O'Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman

• “To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.”
Daniel Patrick Moynihan

• “Being Irish means that I know that life is short, heartache inevitable, and humor essential.”
Alice McDermott

ª “This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.”
― Sigmund Freud

• “When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”
― Edna O'Brien

• “If there were only three Irishmen in the world you'd find two of them in a corner talking about the other.”
― María Brandán Aráoz

• “Irish people marry late, as a rule. We have that potato-famine DNA from the old country, that mentality where you don't give birth to anything until you have the potatoes all stored up to feed it. My ancestors were all shepherds who got married in their thirties and then stayed together for life, who had long and happy marriages, no doubt because they were already deaf. My grandparents courted for nine years before they married in 1933.”
― Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape

• “Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies' heads. Where they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe.
And that is how the Irish saved civilization.”
― Thomas Cahill

• “It is not to political leaders our people must look, but to themselves. Leaders are but individuals, and individuals are imperfect, liable to error and weakness. The strength of the nation will be the strength of the spirit of the whole people.
― Michael Collins, A Path to Freedom

• “This brings back a moment from my grandfather Bill Fadden's funeral. It was a drizzly day and an elderly uncle walking beside me noticed the bottom of a shoe in the walkway, and without missing a beat said, ‘Ah, the poor lost sole.’"
― Maria O’Meara

• "I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born."
― Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats

• “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes

• “We are a vibrant first-world country, but we have a humbling third-world memory.”
Mary McAleese, 1997

• “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
Oscar Wilde, from Lady Windemere’s Fan, 1892

• “On the Irish ladder of success there's always someone on the rung above using your head to steady himself.”
“Anyone can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.”
Oscar (Fingal O'Flahertie Wills) Wilde, Irish Playwright

• “Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.”
Sean O'Casey, Irish Dramatist

• “A dog owns nothing, yet is seldom dissatisfied.”
Irish Proverb

• “It’s not that the Irish are cynical. It’s rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.”
Brendan Behan

• “I think there’s something about the Irish experience — that we had to have a sense of humor or die. That’s what kept us going — a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.”
Frank McCourt

• “I’m an Irish Catholic, and I have a long iceberg of guilt.”
Edna O’Brien