Frank Delaney

“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.”

“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.”

“The difference between a friend and an enemy is friendliness.”

“...fair is a body pigment, that's all it is.”

“Stick a lighted candle up your backside to give yourself that inner glow.”

“The human face does not always reflect the beauty that may repose in the soul.”

“Find your soul and you'll live. Lose your soul and you'll die.”

“It's very healing,' he said, 'to tell yourself your own story as though you were reciting a myth.”

“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.”

“I told you that day: a pair of idiots. I thought she was leading you around by the nose--or some other organ.”

“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.”

“A gust of wind snatched at her hat. She jumped from the wall and her skirts blew everywhere. I couldn't avoid glimpsing more than she intended, and I feared that she might have been embarrassed. Instead she laughed and said, "You're seeing my true colors," and I was the one who blushed.”

“Every pain is a lesson.”

“Start with the difficult and when it gets easy, everything else is easier.”

“Marriage is the gold standard of all relationships. It's the currency by which everything is valued.”

“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.”

“Do you know what the difference is between Friendship and Love? Friendship is the photograph, Love is the oil painting.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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