Literary Birthday – 30 March – Seán O’Casey

Seán O’Casey was born 30 March 1880, and died 18 September 1964.

Seán O’Casey Quotes

1. All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
2. When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.
3. 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.
4. Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
5. You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea; you cannot put an idea up against the barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets; you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell your slaves could ever build.
6. Money does not make you happy but it quiets the nerves.
7. The artist’s life is to be where life is, active life, found in neither ivory tower nor concrete shelter; he must be out listening to everything, looking at everything, and thinking it all out afterwards.
8. Politics has slain its thousands, but religion has slain its ten thousands.
9. There’s no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.
10. There’s nothing so passionate as a vested interest disguised as an intellectual conviction.

Seán O’Casey was an Irish dramatist and memoirist. He wrote a series of Autobiographies: I Knock at the Door ; Pictures in the Hallway ; Drums Under the Windows about life in the slums of Dublin. He juxtaposed tragedy and comedy in his work. ‘The resulting ironic juxtapositions of the comic and tragic reveal the waste of war and the corrosive effects of poverty. O’Casey’s gifts were for vivid characterization and working-class language, and, though he portrayed war and poverty, he wrote some of the funniest scenes in modern drama.'(via) The titles of his plays include The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars. He declined an OBE.

Source for Image: National Gallery of Ireland, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Se%C3%A1n_O%27Casey_.PNG

by Amanda Patterson

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