Irish-American Culture Quotes

You know the way it is: sometimes Americans think of us as their backward little cousin. It's the whole shamrock, potatoes, famine, leprechaun thing, all that drunken paddies rubbish.

Corned beef and cabbage - that's our favorite holiday meal when all the O' Haras gather around the table.

I'm first and foremost an Irishman, by birth, by nature, by soul, but an American citizen through and through as well.

Being Irish was a big thing for me, particularly growing up in Chicago.

I'm from outside of Boston, and in Boston, people are so passionate about their Irishness.

Three-quarters of my family is Irish. Of course, the 'Kazee' is not.

Well I think that's probably one of a few, where I grew up in the City of New York, it's got a lot of energy, my parents are Irish-American so there was a bit of yelling going on in my house but it seemed normal.

Our atheism family tradition is traced to a - I don't know if it was great-great or a great-great-great grandmother who was a poor Irish-American woman in the 1880s in western Montana.

I did the same thing as every Irish person who comes to New York. I arrived on a Wednesday, and by Saturday night, I was pulling pints at a pub in the Bronx.

I'm an Irish-American, and I grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood.

I feel Irish-Americans are the forgotten minority group. Nobody else is making films about them.

Sometimes, there's not an honest engagement of Ireland in Hollywood movies.

My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn. But it was more for me - it was that women of that generation were even less likely to express themselves, more likely to have that active interior life that they didn't dare speak out. So I was interesting in women of that era. I was interested in the language of that era. There's so much. And, certainly, this is cultural, so much there wasn't spoken about.

The phrase the violent bear it away fascinated the 20th century Irish-American storyteller Flannery O'Connor, who used it as the title of one of her novels. O'Connor's surname connects her to an Irish royal family descended from Conchobor (pronounced Connor), the prehistoric king of Ulster who was foster father to Cuchulainn and husband of the unwilling Derdriu. In the western world, the antiquity of Irish lineages is exceeded only by that of the Jews.