Top 35 Frank Delaney Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.”

— Frank Delaney

2. “There’s always good news wrapped up in bad news.”

— Frank Delaney

3. “Should; shouldn’t; ought; oughtn’t – the enemies of contentment.”

— Frank Delaney

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

— Frank Delaney

5. “There are some places you love with your heart, and there are some places that you love with your mind- the places that you love with both are called ‘libraries’”

— Frank Delaney

6. “Every pain is a lesson.”

— Frank Delaney

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

— Frank Delaney

8. “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.”

— Frank Delaney

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

— Frank Delaney

10. “I’ve just had very bad news.” “What’s the good news inside it? There’s always good news wrapped up in bad news.” “Jesus God, I don’t know.” “But there is.” “That’s ludicrously optimistic.” Lelia said, “You’ll have to use smaller words, you’re in Clare now.” Ronan.”

— Frank Delaney

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

— Frank Delaney

12. “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.”

— Frank Delaney

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

— Frank Delaney

14. “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.”

— Frank Delaney

15. “What are you like inside? Don’t you have feelings where you love everyone, and at the same time you hate everyone? Or – don’t you have times when everything goes the way you want, but nothing feels good or right? That’s what I mean,” he’d say, “about my black horse and my white horse.”

— Frank Delaney

16. “What’s the odd one out between an egg, a drum, and a potato?” Ronan shook his head, mystified. “You can beat an egg. You can beat a drum. But you can’t beat a potato. D’you get it, do you?” Matt.”

— Frank Delaney

17. “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.”

— Frank Delaney

18. “Writers have opinions – that, in part, is why they write. Therefore they have strong likes and dislikes.”

— Frank Delaney

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Frank Delaney

20. “Beneath its broad surface, storytelling should always work hard to say more than it seems to.”

— Frank Delaney

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

— Frank Delaney

22. “My mother used to say, “Fun is fun till someone loses an eye.”

— Frank Delaney

23. “As an arts journalist in London, working mainly for the BBC, I interviewed hundreds if not thousands of authors. From them I gleaned a great deal of passing instruction in writing and I observed one fascinating detail: no two writers approach their work – physically – in the same way.”

— Frank Delaney

24. “I’d have to struggle to find a subject in which I can’t get some kind of interested pulse started.”

— Frank Delaney

25. “Stories are where you go to look for the truth of your own life.”

— Frank Delaney

26. “To have come from Ireland no matter how long ago is to be of Ireland in some part forever.”

— Frank Delaney

27. “For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war – bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges.”

— Frank Delaney

28. “Tonight, I’m certainly going to tell you a story, but ’tis a story with a difference because, unlike virtually every other tale I tell-in this case, I was there. And yet I know that although I was there, and I saw people who were real, they have since become somewhat imagined-because I now view them through my memory. That’s something every human being does-but storytellers live by it.”

— Frank Delaney

29. “Guns discommode me. Their facility alarms me. Point and kill. Ruin someone’s life. Remove at a finger pull deeply loved people, as important in their spheres as the sun in the sky. The very weight of a gun disturbs me-an insolent object, insisting on its own importance.”

— Frank Delaney

30. “I suppose if you’ve always been wrapped in wool, you don’t know it’s wool.”

— Frank Delaney

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

— Frank Delaney

32. “Can you lead to dignity a man abused by his employer? Can you give hope for a new life to a woman whose infant has died? Can you guide an oppressed people to freedom and power?”

— Frank Delaney

33. “But can you make someone feel the world all around loves them? Can you make them feel the rain is for cooling them, the wind is for drying them, the sun is for warming them?”

— Frank Delaney

34. “Patrick had left behind some writings, and one of his most famous works was something many of us learned in school called “Saint Patrick’s Breastplate,” a kind of a cross between a hymn and a poem.”

— Frank Delaney

35. “A thing doesn’t have to be true, he said, for a person to get joy out of it. What it has to be is not evil or malicious.”

— Frank Delaney

36. “The point about words is – the better you use them, the stronger is the thought that wears them.”

— Frank Delaney