To Parnassus or the Scaffold

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About To Parnassus or the Scaffold

Pre-boom Dublin. Post-boom Dublin. Rain-sodden Dublin. Drink-sodden Dublin. Priestly Dublin. Penitent Dublin. Votive Dublin. Godfearing Dublin. Gritty Dublin. Grotty Dublin. Granite Dublin. Bedsit Dublin. Humdrum Dublin. Consumptive Dublin. Arthritic Dublin. Dublin with a miscarriage. Dublin clinging to the railings. Dublin from the Onion Tower. Dublin from the Poddle culvert. Dublin through the frosting of a porter glass. A Dublin of rooftops and spires and seagull shit. A Dublin of gutters and drains and piddled-away dreams. Pawn-shop Dublin. Padlocked Dublin. Publocked Dublin. Proud-despite Dublin. Respectable Dublin. Sunday-best Dublin. An abuser's Dublin. A victim's Dublin. A sea dog's Dublin. Mailboat Dublin. MalinHead-SlyneHead-Roche'sPoint Dublin. Maudlin Dublin. Dancehall Dublin. Dogtrack Dublin. Dole-cheque Dublin. Debtors' Dublin. Deathly Dublin. Dark Dublin. Dion Dublin. Dublin from the Gorman. Dublin from the Morning Star. A Dublin of fried breakfasts. A Dublin with the smell of malt in the air. A Dublin pungent with the aroma of never-drying overcoats. Sooty Dublin. Smoky Dublin. Anthracite Dublin. Whitehaven coal Dublin. Super Ser Dublin. Eucharistic Congress '32 Dublin. Italia '90 Dublin. Dublin before the Act of Union. Dublin after the Act of Union. Dublin after the Union. Cheese 'n' Onion Dublin. Fig Rolls Dublin. Milky Mints Dublin. Silvermints Dublin. Dublin of the dolours. Dublin of the Dolocher. Dublin as a refuge. Dublin as Jerusalem. Harry Kernoff's Dublin. Harry Clarke's Dublin. Joyce's Dublin. Donleavy's Dublin. Behan's Dublin. Mannix Flynn's Dublin. Conor McPherson's Dublin. Thomas Kinsella's Dublin. Luke Kelly's Dublin. Leo Burdock's Dublin. Lord Edward Fitzgerald's Dublin. Nurse Mamie Cadden's Dublin. Philip Cairns's Dublin. The Venerable Matt Talbot's Dublin. Frank Duff and the Legion of Mary's Dublin. Salvation Army Dublin. Samaritans Dublin. Dianetics Dublin. Rosacrucians Dublin. Tony Gregory's Dublin. Paul Cleary's Dublin. Stephen Ryan's Dublin. Frank Harte's Dublin. Aidan Walsh's Dublin. Count John McCormack's Dublin. O'Brien On Song Dublin. Noel Purcell's Dublin. Bang Bang's Dublin. Zozimus's Dublin. Eamon Mac Tomais's Dublin. Gerard Manley Hopkins' Dublin. Wittgenstein's Dublin. Wasted Dublin. Hopeless Dublin. Hopeful Dublin. Would-the-last-person-to-leave-please-turn-off-the-lights Dublin.

This group will be strictly curated. In fact, fascistically so. But please don't let that stop you submitting work. Just don't be offended if the curator doesn't find that your image(s) fit(s) in with the vision evoked above.

I have a preference for film - over-exposures, light leaks, scuffs and all - but have nothing against digital, just as long as no nastily-obvious photoshopping is employed (so definitely no HDR).

Period photos are most welcome.

The group name paraphrases a line in Anthony Cronin's memoir of 1950s bohemian Dublin, Dead As Doornails (see below).

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"Blinding in Paris, for his party-piece
Joyce named the shops along O'Connell Street"
- from 'Gravities' by Seamus Heaney

"A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."
- from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

"North-east lies Howth with its bright fields and pretty villas, set in the sapphire waters of the bay; to the left is the greyish blur of smoke marking the position of the city."
- from ‘A Day on Mount Pelier’ in The Neighbourhood of Dublin by Weston St John Joyce

"I suggest we all go into town and pawn our flesh for a Tinker’s song… Let us go and lose our souls in the mad throbbing metropolis of Dublin."
- from Wild Grow the Lilies by Christy Brown

"The tide did not permit the packet to reach the Pigeon-house, and the impatient lord Colambre stepped into a boat, and was rowed across the Bay of Dublin. It was a fine summer morning. The sun shone bright on the Wicklow Mountains. He admired, he exulted in the beauty of the prospect; and all the early associations of his childhood, and the patriotic hope of his riper years, swelled his heart as he approached the shores of his native land. But scarcely had he touched his mother earth, when the whole course of his ideas was changed... for instantly he found himself surrounded and attacked by a swarm of beggars and harpies, with strange figures and stranger tones."
- from The Absentee by Maria Edgeworth

"We lived in a port town. The stories came and went, raucous as Dublin Bay's seagulls... Our street songs and ballads had always been short stories: touching, scabrous, satirical, tender; as alive to the stench of the eddying Liffey as to the possibilities of truth and beauty."
- from 'The Irish Times', 29th of September, 2010, in an article by Joseph O'Connor

"Through windows without glass, at a condemned height,
To the cries of scavengers in off the Dublin docks
We will sense the approach of light
Ahead of our neighbour, the ancient vendor of clocks
Who sleeps downstairs, and has so many dependents
And all the shadowy tenants
Of a made millionaire
Now living elsewhere."
- from 'Early Christians' by Harry Clifton

"I open our sash window to the inner city sky:
Sunday morning clouds, electronic clang of a great bell
Between the rain-drenched quays and the Gresham Hotel"
- from 'Dublin' by Thomas McCarthy

"(He goes to the window and lets up the blind. Morning light into the room defining the set. Faded lettering on the street-side of the window 'JPW KING - DYNAMATOLOGIST'. He stands looking out over the roofs of the city.)
JPW: Christ, how am I going to get through today?"
- from The Gigli Concert by Tom Murphy

"Camden Street in the morning, and a man
lifts a piano above his head,
emerging for a day he knows will offer
only rain and criticism"
- from 'Camden Street in the Morning' by Pat Boran

"Sun
At summer hoist, a wisp
Of smoke from some pedestrian;
Her penitent feet will lead her on.
She does not dally by the sluice
Or the resting barge. An odd head
Hangs on the bridge at Baggot Street;
God is dead"
- from 'Sunday Morning' by Padraic Fallon

"The Angelus bell o'er the Liffey swell rang out through the foggy dew"
- from 'The Foggy Dew' by Canon Charles O'Neill

"We were moving from Summerhill, to somewhere nearer the river. My mother pushed the cart and Granny Nash navigated as she turned the pages of Rousseau's 'Confessions'. I clutched my father's leg, the one he'd worn to the butt the night I'd been born. I was afraid that he wouldn't be able to find us. I spat on the ground at every corner and hoped that he would come looking before it rained and washed my marks away. Granny Nash lifted her bony hand, pointed right and we turned off Summerhill. My mother had to hold on tight to the cart as we sailed down towards the Liffey, down into a lightless hollow where the fogs met."
- from A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle

"Dark, deep, rich Dublin sunlight... The blind planet sat above the city and you must not stare into it, his father had taught him... And Willie stood there and thoughts he didn't welcome began to unsettle him."
- from A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry

"The mist of a summer evening closed in on the hillocks, mounds, and distant promontories, while the last glow of the evening sun caressed the outline of lofty Howth, guardian of the bay and all its furtive loves, lingering on the rocks and dunes of Sandymount, settling gently on the façade of the Star of the Sea church in Sandymount Road, now a refuge for repentant drinkers raising their pleas to the Virgin."
- from The House of Ulysses by Julián Rios

"Day darkens, and a hundred thousand lamps twinkle in the grey horizon – see above the darkling trees a stumpy column rise, see on its base the name of Wellington… and cry, ‘It is the Phaynix!'"
- from The Irish Sketch Book by William Makepeace Thackeray

"Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the living texture below, which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging, unceasing murmur."
- from ‘Two Gallants’ in Dubliners by James Joyce

"The whole terrace
Slammed shut.
I inhaled the granite lamplight,
Divining the energies of the powder"
- from ‘St Catherine’s Clock’ by Thomas Kinsella

"I was free to the lights of my native city, which are very large and welcoming."
- from Confessions of an Irish Rebel by Brendan Behan

"Cars, houses, streets. The wind whip, the slap, the hunkered down temper of the traffic. Growling under the negative lights, the darkroom lights, at the corners and the intersections, the blood red lights. By the glow holed dwellings, the rows of windows – lined up, occupied or empty, who knows? They go up, they go across. Grid work… It’s Dublin. It’s showtime."
- from The Parts by Keith Ridgway

"ANN DEVLIN: All Dublin is awake tonight, and on foot. The air is full of growl and the rumbling of a storm."
- from Robert Emmet by Dion Boucicault

"They were given... Yeats's bedroom in the tall Georgian house on Merrion Square, with reproductions of Blake's wraithlike figures on the walls: a mother and her sons floating, upright and elegant, down the River of Life; an angel leaning precariously from her heavenly steed to gather in her arms a whimpering babe."
- from Black List Section H by Francis Stuart

"Act I: The home of the Clitheroes. It consists of the front and back drawing-rooms in a fine old Georgian house, struggling for its life against the assaults of time, and the more savage assaults of the tenants."
- stage directions from The Plough and the Stars by Sean O'Casey

"Mary Makebelieve lived with her mother in a small room at the very top of a big, dingy house in a Dublin back street. As long as she could remember she had lived in that top back room. She knew every crack in the ceiling, and they were numerous and of strange shape. Every spot of mildew on the ancient wallpaper was familiar. She had, indeed, watched the growth of most from a grayish shade to a dark stain, from a spot to a great blob, and the holes in the skirting of the walls, out of which at nighttime the cockroaches came rattling, she knew also."
- from The Charwoman's Daughter by James Stephens

"It was said then that you couldn't shove a load of coal into a basement without disrupting an avant-garde play. It now seems fascinating that Ireland's new intellectual and cultural life was fermenting in the cellars of elegant Anglo-Irish townhouses, the former landlord class being undermined literally from below."
- from Company by John Montague

"As George Anne Bellamy put it, 'It was impossible to describe to you the horrors of a riot at a Dublin theatre.' The rioters moved across the stage, crowded into the passages behind, broke open dressing-room doors and the wardrobe, beat up a poor 'taylor', thrust swords into closets and chests, and 'revenged themselves upon the stuffing of Falstaff, which they stabbed in many places'."
- from Thomas Sheridan of Smock-Alley by Esther K Sheldon

"I devoured old photographs and became interested in the immutable weight of masonry, of damp plastered walls, yards, dank gardens, the strange plans of derelict Georgian houses, the endless individual rooms that formed the buildings on sublimely dull Georgian streets."
- from Dublin: An Urban History - The Plan of the City by Niall McCullough

"The tall, decaying houses, rising against a sky black with cloud, were waiting for the rain to begin. The gloom outside drew him. He went on impulse... Every rotten doorpost and shattered fanlight reflected his own decay. He had a craving for alcohol that made him no better than the dogs and the cats that nosed about the bins and the gutter. His hopes lay littered with the filth and the garbage of the streets."
- from Strumpet City by James Plunkett

"And the darkness grows thicker, but the man still stands on the bridge. Around him every street is deserted. On the right, murder has ended for the night; on the left, towards Merrion Square, the violins have ceased to sing in the ballrooms; and in their white beds the girls sleep their white sleep of celibacy. Passion and grief have ceased to trouble the aching heart, if not for ever, at least for a while: the murderer's and the virgin's reality are sunk beneath a swift-rolling tide of dreams – a tide deeper than the river that flows beneath the tears of the lonely lover... And now the city sleeps; wharves, walls, and bridges are veiled and have disappeared in the fog that has crept up from the sea; the shameless squalor of the outlying streets is enwrapped in the grey mist, but over them and dark against the sky, the Castle still stretches out its arms as if for some monstrous embrace."
- from A Drama in Muslin by George Moore

"They seemed to know something awful, all of them, some secret, the burden of which had blighted their lives. And I was one of them, or almost. An apprentice, say. An acolyte. I stalked them for hours, loitering behind them on canal bridges, or under archways, where the pigeons strutted, and dust and bits of paper swirled in eddies, and everything was spent and grey and heart-breaking. I can’t explain the melancholy pleasure of those moments, from which I would turn away lingeringly as the last light of day drained down the sky, and the street lamps came on fitfully in the blued autumnal dusk… And then the nights, silver and burnished black, the shadowed buildings crouched under a tilted moon. A neon sign flicks on and off, on and off, in strange silence. Somewhere a woman laughs. In a windswept street by the river two old men in rags are fighting. They caper weakly, panting, swinging their arms, their coat-tails flying… The wet street gleams. A newspaper blows along the pavement, plasters itself against a grille. A huge seagull alights on the road, fixing me warily with one round eye. I pause in a doorway, wait, eager and afraid. Some dirty little truth is being wearily disclosed here… Foul breath of river, dark slop of waters, slide, and slop again. Hush!"
- from Mefisto by John Banville

"I dreamt that I met Frank Duff
I said to him, 'Good night',
He said, 'I can give you Jesus
If you repent to me this night.'
He said, 'Deep below this city
There are deep and hidden caves,
And in the deepest of these unholy sites
Somebody wrote: Jesus Saves.'"
- from 'Only Jesus Knows' by Barry McCormack

"From wall to wall this labyrinth of self-shaping
Ran indecipherable yet obvious, a willing
Into the face of a sheet blank as death of
Mythographic, musical, bullish, last images,
A plump cave-painter busy in the half-light
Of a skittishly pagan Plurabella moon"
- from 'On Hearing of the Death of Gerald Davis' by Fred Johnston

"By the side of the dead wall which bounded the College Park, the sounds followed, recommencing almost simultaneously with his own steps. The same unequal pace – sometimes slow, sometimes for a score yards or so, quickened almost to a run – was audible from behind him. Again and again he turned; quickly and stealthily he glanced over his shoulder – almost at every half-dozen steps; but no one was visible."
- from ‘The Familiar’ in In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu

"If the dead were all around me, was it conceivable that I myself had joined their legion ranks? Was this heaven or hell on the North Circular Road?"
- from 'There Are Little Kingdoms' in There Are Little Kingdoms by Kevin Barry

"Beneath the amber hood
of the street lamp,
beside the black gates
of the somnolent park,
we are eyed by fanlights"
- from 'Confluence' by Katie Donovan

"No swamp or jungle could hold more threats than the tacitly ruled-out parts of one's own city. Even along the verges of Stephen's Green there were canyon-like streets that could intimidate me. And the winter weather in which I always knew it went to make much of Dublin cryptic and austere, massed with those architectural shadows that make engravings frown. My fear was not social - not the rich child's dread of the slum. It was charnel fear, of grave dust and fungus dust. And it was claustrophobic - something might shut on me, never to let me go again; something might fall on me, never to let me through."
- from Seven Winters by Elizabeth Bowen

"Down stucco sidestreets
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist
Brings lights on in shops
Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes."
- from 'Dublinesque' by Philip Larkin

"It didn't seem possible that anyone could spend thirty years in Dublin without once going in and out of Stephen's Green Park... He decided to cross the street at once and go into the park at the next entrance. He paused at the curb to look up and down the street, and then he saw, at the far end of the square, a funeral approaching him on his side of the street. The hearse was drawn by two black horses that had black plumes on their heads, and he had the impression that the line of black mourning cars behind it would be a long one."
- from 'A Young Girl Can Spoil Her Chances' in The Springs of Affection by Maeve Brennan

"And the ghosts of overdoses
Replaced the ghosts of tuberculosis"
- from ‘Ghosts of Overdoses’ by Damien Dempsey

"At times we moved at a funeral pace and those badly lit alleyways could have been some ghostly apparition of a dead city which we were driving through. Murky lanes with broken street lights, the ragged edges of tumbledown buildings, a carpet of glass and condoms, of chip papers and plastic cartons and, picked out in the headlights, the hunched figures of children and tramps wrapped in blankets or lying under cardboard, their hands raised to block the glare of headlights."
- from The Journey Home by Dermot Bolger

"Dublin is probably the shabbiest, most derelict city in Europe, chaotic and disorderly... The eyesores are everywhere - weed-strewn derelict sites surrounded by decaying hoardings, dilapidated buildings boarded up and left to face the elements, gap-toothed streets... For those of us who were born here, the sad reality is that we can no longer take pride in calling ourselves Dubliners."
- from The Destruction of Dublin by Frank McDonald

"How can I leave the town that brings me down
That has no jobs
Is blessed by God
And makes me cry?"
- from 'Dublin' by Phil Lynott

"The squares, the terraces, the grand parades, going, going, deserted, weed-grown, the city of the Raj, waiting for the demolition men, gone."
- from 'Envoi: Bloomsday', first published in New Society (1982), by Angela Carter

"Porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse"
- from 'Dublin' by Louis MacNeice

"The Broadstone[’s]… lonely grandeur is emphasised now by its disuse as a terminus, and the melancholy quarter of high-and-dry hotels close beside it. It stands on rising ground, and the traveller who sees it for the first time, so unexpected in its massive amplitude, feels a little as he might if he were to stumble unawares upon the monstrous silences of Karnak or Luxor."
- from Dublin 1660-1860 by Maurice Craig

"From Westland Row they got a taxi... She knew every inch of this squalid station and the street outside: the Cumberland and Grosvenor hotels, the dingy bed-and-breakfasts, the metal bridge... How the lights of this city used to glow in the night..."
- from The Barracks by John McGahern

"The lights in Westland Row were so dim when the train pulled in, I almost fell on to the tracks... I blundered throught the streets, one hand against the sooty walls."
- from Sunrise With Sea Monster by Neil Jordan

"And the whole world parts in front of us like the Red Sea itself, all roar and glamour, and we walk in lockstep through the fresh fragrance of horse-droppings and the good body-odours, by God, of our own human domain. Refugees from the Pale of Settlement and the broken Balkans are pouring down from the mailboat train at Westland Street station, the Singer sewing machines carried on their shoulders like the Ark of the Tabernacle."
- from Walking Out Together by Aidan Mathews

"At Kingsbridge, whose thin and eager ridge
Is loving and bitter as a world-weary midge,
I got into the green-pink worried train,
Got out of it again and in again,
Was borne in its circumambient pain"
- from 'Mystic Journey' by Rev Michael F Egan

"And you know you gotta go
On that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row,
Throwing pennies at the bridges down below"
- from 'Madame George' by Van Morrison

"He bolted headlong out of the laneway and clattered away across the street. He wheeled to the right, ran ten yards and then dived into another lane. He continued his flight without stopping. He ran without purpose, without guidance, driven northwards by panic and the impossibility of thought. He ran headlong in all directions, into a street, down its course, then to the left, back again in a parallel line, down once more the street he had left, passing several times the same corner in his mad flight. He ran desperately, as if he were chasing some elusive sprite that delighted in turning on its own tracks. He floundered through pools. He struggled on his hands and knees over waste plots. He crushed through holes in torn walls. He climbed over piles of bricks, over walls, jumped into backyards and then climbed back again into another street... Then suddenly a clock struck the half-hour close by him. It was half-past four. He stopped dead, attracted by the tolling of the clock. It was not the sound but the remembrance it brought. He knew that clock."
- from The Informer by Liam O'Flaherty

"Dublin. Beware the risen people. He was standing on a Dublin street having a cigarette. This was a real moment. So were those men kicking the blackened cushion around that the kegs landed on off the lorry. So was that taxi-driver loading his boot with the suitcases of two Chinese. He was sure he would remember this moment in years to come."
- from The Swing of Things by Sean O’Reilly

"Irish poets open you eyes,
Even Cabra can surprise;
Try the dog-tracks now and then –
Shelbourne Park and crooked men"
- from ‘Irish Poets Open Your Eyes’ by Patrick Kavanagh

"Guinness stains my only shirt,
I can’t wear it
Into work"
- from ‘The Shaky Man’ by Niall McCormack

"McDaid’s was never merely a literary pub. Its strength was always in variety, of talent, class, caste and estate. The divisions between writer and non-writer, bohemian and artist, informer and revolutionary, male and female, were never rigorously enforced; and nearly everybody, gurriers included, was ready for elevation, to Parnassus, the scaffold or wherever."
- from Dead as Doornails by Anthony Cronin

"The three of us walked slowly down to Grogan's, our three voices interplaying in scholarly disputations, our faded overcoats finely open in the glint of the winter sun. 'Isn't there a queer smell off this fellow?' said Brinsley, directing his inquiring face to that of Donaghy. I sniffed at my person in mock appraisement. 'You're in bad odour,' said Donaghy."
- from At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

"Brennan's face was just a white face in the gloom of the basement. His voice was a dry croak, little more than a whisper, and Joe licked his own cracked lips as he looked up through the grating at the dying light outside. He'd never felt more in need of a drink in all his life, but there was nothing to be done... A few yards further and they would have made it to a pub."
- from The Soldier's Song by Alan Monaghan

"I was looking forward in high excitement to the imminent clash of the Republic and the Soviets in Dalymount Park... To soothe my seething mind I adjourned to the Harp, that seductive oasis on O'Connell Bridge... We were in no great hurry to go to the North Circular Road."
- from In So Many Words: The Best of Con Houlihan by Con Houlihan

"Heavier or more sustained drinking than took place in the Pearl and Palace during those years may never have occured before or will again - it is still remembered with awe by the old timers. It might have had something to do with the war, for there was little to spend money on and, as I have said, drink itself was not scarce. Chat never is in Dublin, and we must only imagine what novels and poems and plays drifted up and lodged with the nicotine in the ceilings of those hostelries."
- from Remembering How We Stood by John Ryan

"Last night as I slept
I dreamt I met with Behan,
I shook him by the hand and we passed the time of day.
When questioned on his views
On the crux of life's philosophies,
He had but these few clear and simple words to say:
I am going, I am going
Any which way the wind may be blowing,
I am going, I am going
Where streams of whiskey are flowing"
- from 'Streams of Whiskey' by Shane MacGowan

"The weather broke, and there was a day of wild wind and driving showers of tepid rain. First the streets steamed, then streamed. The river's surface became pocked steel, and the seagulls whirled and plummeted, riding the billowing gales. An inside-out umbrella skittered across O'Connell Bridge and was run over, crunchingly, by a bus. Quirke sat with his assistant, Sinclair, in a café at a corner by the bridge. They drank dishwater coffee, and Sinclair ate a currant bun. They came down here sometimes from the hospital at lunchtime, though neither of them could remember how they had settled on this particular place, or why; it was a dismal establishment, especially in this weather, the windows fogged over and the air heavy with cigarette smoke and the stink of wet clothing."
- from The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black

"Bewley’s is like the dining cars on trains in the black and white pictures – both are places for romantics like me; places where a person can sit privately and watch characters and be sure of witnessing or imagining meetings of great consequences to a few."
- from The Book-Thief’s Heartbeat by Philip Davison

"It dawned on him how fast Dublin people walked. For a city that was world-renowned for its laid-back attitude, they sure were in a hurry to get somewhere."
- from The Detainees by Sean Hughes

"Long straight Pearse Street, it permitted of a simple cantilena in his mind, its footway peopled with the tranquil and detached in fatigue, its highway dehumanised in a tumult of buses."
- from ‘A Wet Night’ in More Pricks Than Kicks by Samuel Beckett

"Probably, he is drifting in the same direction
in no hurry to reach there,
unlike hasty pedestrians,
dwellers of the swarming city that repeatedly
thrusts them back to the remote past"
- from 'The Golem of Arbour Hill' by Anatoly Kudriavitsky

“At dusk the procession started off... Drays had been requisitioned, the still bodies lay uncovered as we moved across the city, our advanced flank and rearguards with brush handles and butchers’ knives. Through O’Connell Street, past Trinity and a turn into Dame Street. Where were we going we wondered?... Past Dublin Castle… We readied our spears. Up the hill by Christ Church Cathedral and down the old streets of the Coombe. Where the hell were we going?”
- from On Another Man's Wound by Ernie O'Malley

"It is the last stretch I cannot bear, when I come to the top of Kildare Street and have no choice but to walk in a straight line along Merrion Row and Baggot Street towards Pembroke Road. This is the grim city with a few damp bars and creepy nightclubs and places to buy chips and hamburgers and kebabs. The street lights are dim and there is a sense in behind the house facades of murderous old spaces with half-rotting floorboards, with crumbling brick and rattling windows and creaking stairways and alarm systems in urgent need of repair."
- from 'The Pearl Fishers' in The Empty Family by Colm Toibin

"The city was the colour of dishwater. A few papers blew around Daniel O'Connell's concrete feet. He went into an amusement arcade and played the machines for a while. The man in the glass booth ticked off horses in the 'Daily Mirror' and passed out cylinders of coins one after the other. Malachy won two pounds and then lost it again. He walked as far as Grafton Street. He went into four pubs and had a whiskey in each."
- from The Dead School by Patrick McCabe

"I... went into the city centre where you could get a woman for five shillings. Crilly's on the quays and another pub in Talbot Street were hangouts for what we called semi-professionals, women who subsidised their drinking by throwing the leg for a few bob... I thought it was the most natural thing in the world, the thing for a young guy with flair to be doing. It never occurred to me that most of it was my way of trying to escape from the flats and overall dark and grey city of Dublin which seemed to me to be some kind of graveyard with lights."
- from My Middle Name Is Lucky: The Memoirs of Ireland's Most Banned Author by Lee Dunne

"Dublin was a diamond I was leaving behind. Fascists had oozed out their songs over pianos in this diamond during the war, soft, milky songs, songs sung by women about Hitler’s Adam’s apple. I knew I’d never return to the same city."
- from A New Shirt by Desmond Hogan

"Jesus, this city, how I hate thee, let me count the ways."
- from 'The Sunday Father' by Frank McGuinness in New Dubliners ed. Oona Frawley

"There is nowhere on earth, probably, as accepting as Dublin of men who... are barely clinging on."
- from Almost There by Nuala O'Faolain

"The condemned man entered Dublin, argued, worked, prayed, reprehended, spoke words of pathos... each of those acts destined to shine forth in glory."
- from 'The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero' in Artifices by Jorge Luis Borges

"Life here has always required poetic, dreamy, romantic and nostalgic spectacles, in order to put up with this life and give it meaning. Without such spectacles Dublin is little more than a great nineteenth-century working neighbourhood, a sea of squat brick blocks of flats with here and there the grey columns of a large historical building. At almost all these buildings, a hero once died."
- from In Europe by Geert Mak

"The central church of all the churches in a city where they were as plentiful as cinemas was a small cathedral in a ragged, smelly street. No spires soared above it. It crouched, grey stone stained with the drifting of smoke, close to the ground, dwarfed by the red and brown brick walls of the high uneven houses where poor people lived. Within, it was congested with pillars and cumbersome inartistic statues to dead ecclesiastics; and the poor people escaping from the odours of the red and brown houses came there to pray, craning their necks to catch between the pillars a glimpse of the altar and the ancient ceremony of sacrifice."
- from The Cards of the Gambler by Benedict Kiely

"Shakespeare was known and respected in working-class Dublin and recited often at pubs and parties. Bel canto arias were sung in pubs as an approved and recognized turn and among tradesmen especially it was not uncommon to find in a tenement room a small library of Dickens, Shaw, Shakespeare and some of the Russian authors, which were read and re-read over again. Through the Church, they learned to use symbol as a means of survival... In the Crucifixion and Resurrection they encountered promise of existence beyond earthly agony. Among the incense and candles, the swell of the Latin chant, the sensuous swing of chasubles, purple for pain, green for joy, black for death, they discovered that imagination could provide an anodyne against the worst that poverty and injustice could do to them."
- from Brendan Behan by Ulick O'Connor

"Excitement beckoned with down-to-earth girls from the Jacob's biscuit factory... Evelyn, who put creamy white sugar fillings in the Kimberly biscuits, was for me the reincarnation of Molly Bloom. She was a philosopher, who would sit of an evening looking at the moon while mesmerizing myself and others with tales of her impoverished family."
- from 'Ireland's Tangier' by Damian Duggan-Ryan in Trinity Tales ed. Sebastian Balfour, Laurie Howes, Michael de Larabeiti and Anthony Weale

"On a rainy afternoon,
On a gambling machine.
Same old jukebox and old tune;
It's hard to break an old routine.
Everything's black and white and grey,
Living from day to day to day.
It's a fatal resignation
When there's nothing left to hope for
In a hopeless situation.
I'm not waiting at an airport,
I'm not waiting at a station,
I'm standing at a bus stop."
- from 'Downmarket' by Paul Cleary

"Even at this early hour his eyes were set and staring, his features frozen in a grimace of plethoric good will. The noon-tide Angelus rang from the Carmelite Church and, vaguely making the sign of the Cross, he reeled away out of sight into Mooney's Bar. A walk in Dublin is full of such encounters. They perhaps explain the wary look in the eyes of Dubliners and the strange crab-like sidle of the more nervous among them. The streets bristle with danger... It is perhaps the only village on earth that contains half a million souls: one great big unhappy family, as a Dublin writer cried out once, burying his face in his hands... After only a few hours I was ceasing to be the homing traveller and becoming the uneasy resident. The transition from one state of mind to the other grows perceptibly smoother with every return: ultimately the mere sight of Dublin hills on the horizon will call forth a whimper of apprehension."
- from Mind You, I've Said Nothing! by Honor Tracy

"Whatever unruly tensions you may have in your character, your relationships, your health, your mental equilibrium: every weak and dark and painful place you've got will be screaming and turning elephantine before you've even reached an exit in Dublin airport."
- from Paradise by A.L. Kennedy

"The air between them is too thin for love. The only thing that can be thrown across the air of Dublin town is a kind of jeering."
- from The Gathering by Anne Enright

"They transferred me and put me in Mountjoy Prison. From there on in it was hell on earth, and it looked like it was going to go on forever... Mountjoy was filled with IRA, UDA, psychopathic murderers, and the lot. I was lucky in this respect that the warders decided to make an example of me. They stripped me naked and threw me out in the exercise yard and hosed me down. The rest of the prisoners watched and figured I must be all right."
- from No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs by John Lydon

"If you have revisited the town, thin Shade,
Whether to look upon your monument
(I wonder if the builder has been paid)
Or happier-thoughted when the day is spent
To drink of that salt breath out of the sea
When grey gulls flit about instead of men,
And the gaunt houses put on majesty:
Let these content you and be gone again;
For they are at their old tricks yet."
- from 'To a Shade' by William Butler Yeats

"Just beyond the lights of Butt Bridge, which were barely visible in the early morning darkness, was all the glory of the international navies which paid and still pay visits to our capital city. French cigarettes were provided generously by sailors seeking information in pidgin English about the venues of dances and the general whereabouts of Dublin girls."
- from ‘Dublin: City of Dreams and Nightmares’ in A Man with a Hat by John McNamee

"Houses upside down in water are not there.
If I step into the river, open doors,
No one will call out to me, or lean to talk
About the city flowing past, and if I walk
The watery streets no eyes will stare
For the dead can't see"
- from 'Along The Liffey' by Sheila O'Hagan

"Go around to the Liffey side of the ship. Down there are the waters from Blessington. Man taking the cable to the other side. I want to see some seamanship, boys. Smartly. Making too much noise with these oarlocks. South over there is the Trinity College, the Ballsbridge, Donnybrook, Milltown, Windy Harbour and beyond. I know them all. Cold killing wind between my knees. Slant black spires of the little mountains. Within that carpet of light. All my tiny sad despairs."
- from The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy

"I walk through walls
I float down the Liffey
I’m not here
This isn’t happening"
- from 'How to Disappear Completely' by Thomas Yorke

"Fergus nudges his wheelchair up to the riverwall and watches the Liffey flow quickly along, bloated from an evening rain, a cargo of night sky and neon, all bellying down towards Dublin Bay. He remembers his father once heaving a fridge into the river and wonders what else might lie down there. Flakes of gold paint from the Guinness barges perhaps. Blackened shells from British army gunboats. Condoms and needles. Old black kettles. Pennies and prams. History books, harmonicas, fingernails, and baskets full of dead flowers."
- from 'Along the Riverwall' in Fishing the Sloe-Black River by Colum McCann

"Out in the harbour, on the widows walk,
The wind bites our lips as we try to talk,
And the sea is as blue as a country drunk
Trying to sing a Tennessee waltz.
Watching the mailboat and the harbour madonna glow,
I thought of the times I was glad to go,
Now there’s something to hold me,
There’s something I want to know:
Why do you get what you want
When you don’t want it anymore?"
- from 'Widows Walk' by Stephen Ryan

"On three separate occasions he jumped into the Liffey and saved a person from drowning. We had him preserved. We felt it was his due."
- Caption underneath Fred, a stuffed dog, in St Martin’s Chapel on Parnell Square, Dublin

"This slum was wearing the blue-black punched out by the lamps, but with a dignity that I can believe is the start of poems."
- from ‘Tender’ in The Miracle Shed by Philip MacCann

"And I just came up the steps with him one night, into the street. And whatever it was, the way the buildings looked, it took me back in time. And I felt that you… I felt that you were with me."
- from Dublin Carol by Conor McPherson

"Out here you can breathe.
Between showers, the street
empty. Forget your lover
faithless in the chilly bed
who'll wake soon and wonder
if you've left for good.
Granite under your feet
glitters, nearby a siren. Threat
or a promise? You take Fumbally Lane
to the Blackpitts, cut back by the canal."
- from 'City: Night Walk' by Paula Meehan

"His eyes wandered to the sea of roofs. His girl looked at him, as if surprised by some cavern in him that she had not seen before and must, maybe, yet explore. She did not guess that in his mind that image of a vast Dublin, growing and decaying, was still dilating like a smoke in wind."
- from 'Discord' in Stories of Sean O'Faolain by Sean O'Faolain

"The midnight sun is darkened. The earth trembles. The dead of Dublin from Prospect and Mount Jerome in white sheepskin overcoats and black goatfell cloaks arise and appear to many."
- from Ulysses by James Joyce