Quotes by Irish Authors

Stories come alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth. Or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.
John Connolly
It is the present living generation that gives character and spirit to the next. Hence the paramount importance of accomplished and energetic teachers in forming the taste the manners and the character of the coming age.
Alexander Campbell
The more people I meet the happier I become.
Samuel Beckett
Write what is important to you, regardless of fashion or marketability or anything like that – all those things are so far out of your control that you may as well not think about them. Of course, this may mean you’ll never be published but that’s a risk we all take every single time we set hands to keyboard or pen to paper. For me, if I can sit back at the end of a project and say, ‘yes, I stayed honest, I said what I wanted to say, and I made it sing to the best of my ability’, then I’m happy enough. Of course, if anyone wants to buy the damned thing off me when I’m done, that’s jam I won’t refuse.
Celine Kiernan
You cannot create genius. All you can do is nurture it.
Ninette de Valois
There's something hostile about the way they enter and leave the room that tells you what they think of you. It could be your imagination and you try to figure out what will bring them over to your side. You try lessons that worked with other classes but even that doesn't help and it's because of that chemistry. They know when they have you on the run. They have instincts that detect your frustrations.
Frank McCourt
War never leaves where it found a nation.
Edmund Burke
The fickleness of the woman I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
George Bernard Shaw
B-but, Mr Jimson, I w-want to be an artist.''Of course you do,' I said, 'everybody does once. But they get over it, thank God, like the measles and the chickenpox. Go home and go to bed and take some hot lemonade and put on three blankets and sweat it out.''But Mr J-Jimson, there must be artists.''Yes, and lunatics and lepers, but why go and live in an asylum before you're sent for? If you find life a bit dull at home,' I said, 'and want to amuse yourself, put a stick of dynamite in the kitchen fire, or shoot a policeman. Volunteer for a test pilot, or dive off Tower Bridge with five bob's worth of roman candles in each pocket. You'd get twice the fun at about one-tenth of the risk.
Joyce Cary
People that are scared of the dark have great imaginations and are my kind of people. Those who see nothing in the darkness are boring.
Stewart Stafford
...that it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
Brian Friel
It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul.
Niall Williams
One misspoken word and the world will no longer know you. Mark Andrew Ramsay
Brendan Carroll
I'm placing you under arrest for murder, conspiracy to commit murder and, I don't know, possibly littering.
Derek Landy
Another thing about Oscar is that he wasn’t afraid of anyone. And he always made up his own mind, no matter what other people said. They’re two of the best things I remember about him now.He wasn’t just my friend. He was kind of magic. I can’t really explain it better than that. He was honest and he was decent and he was always cheerful. And evem though his brother Stevie had to use a wheelchair, it wasn’t a problem the way people usually think it is, because Oscar always made sure that every door was opened and every stairway had a ramp, and every train station had the right access so he could get it. He used to say that if the world was designed properly, the whole population would be flying around the place in wheelchairs. And when he said that, Stevie used to laugh.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
Some people are molded by their admirations others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen
Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
George Bernard Shaw
Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.
Oscar Wilde
It's not the job of this town to make me feel happy. It's not this town´s fault that I don't feel I fit in. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, because it's about where you are in your head. It's about the other world I inhabit. The world of dreams, hope, imagination, and memories. I'm happy up here, and because of that I'm happy up there too
Cecelia Ahern
The man who will not defend the honour of his cat cannot be trusted to defend anything.
Robert Lynd
Everything in my head was secondhand, too: Catholicism; Ireland's sad history, a litany of suffering and martyrdom drummed into me by priests, schoolmasters and parents who knew no better.
Frank McCourt
Forgiveness doesn’t make one person better, or the other guy smaller. Forgiving is just letting go. It’s turning back toward being what we really are.
Edward Fahey
The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.
Peter Rollins
I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought:
Oscar Wilde
We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?
Iris Murdoch
You said you didn't want to get involved with me,that one of us would get hurt and how you couldn't bear it. Well that just isn't good enough..Look what happens to people just living their lives. They get hurt, it's not fair they get hurt but they do, all the time, no matter how careful they are. Somebody can just just come along and hurt them, for no stupid reason..
Julian Gough
A prince may be seen happy today and ruined tomorrow without having shown any chance in his character. For the prince who relies entirely on fortune is lost when it changes...
Neil Jordan
It is as though the human race is always only waiting for permission to hate.
Celine Kiernan
Meg and Belch only had eyes for each other. Not in the usual romantic sense.
Eoin Colfer
Don’t listen to advice. Give yourself the freedom to make your own errors, it’s the only way you’ll learn.
Stewart Stafford
What was the power that induced strong soldiers to put off their jackets and shirts, and present their hands to be tied up, and tortured for hours, it might be, under the scourge, with an air of ready volition? The moral coercion of despair; the result of an unconscious calculation of chances that satisfies them that it is ultimately better to do all that, bad as it is, than try the alternative. These unconscious calculations are going on every day with each of us, and the results embody themselves in our lives; and no one knows that there has been a process and a balance struck, and that what they see, and very likely blame, is by the fiat of an invisible but quite irresistible power.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.
Oscar Wilde
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
Oscar Wilde
You cannot plan the future by the past.
Edmund Burke
It's too good, she is. She wants to find the good in others, and sometimes her way of finding that is to trust them, hoping she'll not be disappointed but she sometimes is.
Claire Keegan
Our minds do unusual things sometimes, Tamara. When we’re looking for things it takes it upon itself to go down its own route. All we can do is follow
Cecelia Ahern
Most people are boring and stupid.
Oscar Wilde
The fear of dogs is deep and universal amongst all that are less than Man.
Lord Dunsany
And now that they have us here, under their control, they've dropped whatever act they had on earth. We're seeing them as they really are.' He dipped his glove into the water and watched as the water turned golden. The air suddenly smelled of citrus. 'Look! It's orange juice!''Josh, focus!''You sound just like Mom or Isis or whatever her name is.
Michael Scott
Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.
Edna O'Brien
The question will arise and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine: Which shall rule — wealth or man? Which shall lead — money or intellect? Who shall fill public stations — educated and patriotic freemen or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?
Edward G. Ryan
I decided that if I didn't allow myself to fall asleep, then I wouldn't have to wake up again and despair.
Sara Baume
He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage.
James Joyce
Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist.
Oscar Wilde
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
Oscar Wilde
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Oscar Wilde
I can't remember the name of the piece, or the artist. Maybe it wasn't even an artwork. Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behavior is an act of performance.
Sara Baume
All I want to do now is look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to.
Oscar Wilde
Man wants but little here below Nor wants that little long.
Oliver Goldsmith
Sometimes the hardest thing is admitting you were wrong. It’s hard to say you need to be forgiven.
Jane Casey
And when in doubt, Josh, follow your heart. Words can be false, images and sounds can be manipulated. But this... This is always true.
Michael Scott
Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.
George Bernard Shaw
Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated: they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only “frail.” They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative, only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all: liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls.
George Bernard Shaw
This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.
Laurence Sterne
But there are not two laws, that was the next thing I thought I understood, not two laws, one for the healthy, another for the sick, but one only to which all must bow, rich and poor, young and old, happy and sad. He was eloquent. I pointed out that I was not sad. That was a mistake. Your papers, he said, I knew it a moment later. Not at all, I said, not at all. Your papers! he cried. Ah my papers.
Samuel Beckett
Mercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.
Iris Murdoch
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
W.B. Yeats
His [Faraday's] third great discovery is the Magnetization of Light, which I should liken to the Weisshorn among mountains-high, beautiful, and alone.
John Tyndall
There's no talent here, this is hard work. This is an obsession. Talent does not exist, we are all equals as human beings. You could be anyone if you put in the time. You will reach the top, and that's that. I am not talented. I am obsessed.
Conor McGregor
You know what we have to do?"The Italian nodded. "I know.""You don't look too happy about it.""Defacing a beautiful building is a crime.""But killing people is not?" Dee asked."Well, people can always be replaced.
Michael Scott