Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 12

We hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time as a function of our own action.
J.D. Bernal
There was no honor in war, less in killing, and none in dying. But there was true dignity in how men comported themselves in battle. And there was always honor to be found in standing for a just cause and defending the defenseless.
Michael Scott
It's okay to write a cliché in a first draft; it sets a marker that you can get far, far away from in the rewrites.
Stewart Stafford
Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.
Bernadette Devlin
That's what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.
Colum McCann
It was an earthquake, tearing at the sons of America, trying to swallow them up. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful sons, that women had reared, had kissed and screamed at, and that fathers had stared intently in their cots, to see themselves in the wondrous mirrors of their babies.
Sebastian Barry
Our toys were sixteen or seventeen; only the very eldest were in their early twenties, because, apparently, I didn't envision anything of particular interest in life beyond twenty-five. And now I am a greater age than any of the toys were allowed to reach, older than I even cared to imagine as a child.
Sara Baume
Please don't arrest me.""Listen to me, I'm not going to arrest you, ok? I'm not a cop.""Are you sure?""Am I sure I'm not a cop? yes, I'm sure.""You could be undercover.
Derek Landy
I know it's crazy to believe in silly things, but it's not that easy
kodaline
Never say more than is necessary.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
But I don't think Art's an Einstein - he likes tugging ears, biting people and burping too much to be a genius.
Darren Shan
I think it is true to say only an inferior person has rights. When you hear a person talking about his rights, you may be sure he is trying to gain by dint of shouting something which he lacks ( or had and lost) by reason of some culpable deficiency in himself.
Flann O'Brien
One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.
Colum McCann
We are different, my friend. We are visionaries. A monkey looks up and sees and banana, and that is as far as he looks. But a visionary looks up and sees the moon.
Eoin Colfer
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
George Bernard Shaw
I am afraid we women are factionists; we always take a side, and nature has formed us for advocates rather than judges.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
I am very pleased you like my stories. They are studies in prose, put for Romance's sake into fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find simplicity in a subtle strangeness.
Oscar Wilde
Ah! Happy they whose hearts can breakAnd peace of pardon win!How else may man make straight his pathAnd cleanse his soul from sin?How else but through a broken heartMay the Lord Christ enter in?
Oscar Wilde
Dogs were generally incompatible with melancholy.
John Connolly
It was a sign of growing up, when the dark made no more difference to you than the day.
Roddy Doyle
Sometimes a noble failure serves the world as faithfully as a distinguished success.
Edward Dowden
The Celt, and his cromlechs, and his pillar-stones, these will not change much – indeed, it is doubtful if anybody at all changes at any time. In spite of hosts of deniers, and asserters, and wise-men, and professors, the majority still are adverse to sitting down to dine thirteen at a table, or being helped to salt, or walking under a ladder, of seeing a single magpie flirting his chequered tale. There are, of course, children of light who have set their faces against all this, although even a newspaperman, if you entice him into a cemetery at midnight, will believe in phantoms, for everyone is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt, unlike any other, is a visionary without scratching.
W.B. Yeats
You look angry," he said."You put me on hold.""For a very good reason.""You put me," she said very, very slowly, "on hold.
Derek Landy
Writing when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.
Laurence Sterne
And Nurd, who had never had a mother and father, and who had never loved or been loved, marvelled at the ways in which feeling so wonderful could also leave one open to so much pain. In a strange way, he envied Samuel even that. He wanted to care about someone so much that it could hurt.
John Connolly
Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.
Oscar Wilde
I find it rude to laugh at a man with a sword.
Derek Landy
The high domed ceiling put me in mind of a skull, a brain, a mind. What did that make us, the readers?
Lia Mills
Failed relationships can be described as so much wasted makeup.Forget the laughs, forget the fights, forget the sex, forget the jealousy. But take off your hat and observe a moment's silence for the legions of unknown tubes of foundation, mascara, eyeliner, blusher and lipstick who died that it might all have been possible. But who died in vain.
Marian Keyes
Trench dirt didn't always wash out, I am sure.
Sebastian Barry
When we have learnt to call storms, storms, and death, death, and birth, birth, when we have mastered the sailor's horn-book and Mr Piddington's law of cyclones, Ellis's anatomy and Lewer's midwifery, we have already made ourself half blind. We have become hypnotized by words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas; the commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is half crushed.
Henry de Vere Stacpoole
He is a Christian, and believes charity begins at home. And often it remains there.
Paul Kearney
I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that the delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it.
Edmund Burke
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Oscar Wilde
For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren't waiting for.
Tana French
I would sooner lose my best friend than my worst enemy. To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.
Oscar Wilde
Then I perceived, what I had never thought, that all these staring houses were not alike, but different one from another, because they held different dreams.
Lord Dunsany
Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
Oscar Wilde
I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books--whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives.
Cecelia Ahern
Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?
George Bernard Shaw
I do not think my life would make a very interesting book,' I say. 'I feel I can speak with a certain amount of authority here.
Paul Murray
And you’re kind of like a snowflake.’Oh, Jesus Christ.He masked his fleeting surprise with a quirked eyebrow. ‘Excuse me?’‘Nothing,’ I said quickly. ‘I didn’t say anything.’‘No, no,’ he said, rounding on me so his face was too close, his eyes too searing, his smile too irritating. ‘I’m a snowflake, am I?
Catherine Doyle
Estragon: You see, you feel worse when I'm with you. I feel better alone, too.Vladmir: Then why do you always come crawling back?Estragon: I don't know.
Samuel Beckett
My dear fellow, it isn't easy to be anything nowadays. There's such a lot of beastly competition about.
Oscar Wilde
Some guys get fifteen years, others get life.So death for Edbut not for everyone.Cos it all depends on who you kill and where you kill them too.Like,don't shoot a white cop in Walker Country, Texas. If that's your plan, do it in Arlington, New York- no needles of electric chairs there.Just doesn't seen fair to me.
Sarah Crossan
The idea that she would leave all of this - the rooms of the house once more familiar and warm and comforting - and go back to Brooklyn and not return for a long time again frightened her now. She knew as she sat on the edge of the bed and took her shoes off and then lay back with her arms behind her head that she had spent every day putting off all thought of her departure and what she would meet on her arrival.
Colm Tóibín
Remember what I told you. If they hated me, they will hate you.
Sinead O'Connor
Written over the gate here are the words 'Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.' Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us - and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.
Iris Murdoch
To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.
Oscar Wilde
I knew one boy who passed through several schools a dunce and a laughing-stock; the National Board and the Intermediate Board had sat in judgment upon him and had damned him as a failure before men and angels. Yet a friend and fellow-worker of mine discovered that he was gifted with a wondrous sympathy for nature, that he loved and understood the ways of plants, that he had a strange minuteness and subtlety of observation—that, in short, he was the sort of boy likely to become an accomplished botanist.
Pádraic Pearse
Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is asacrament that should be taken kneeling.
Oscar Wilde
Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
Oscar Wilde
Magnus remembered a town in Peru whose Quechua name meant “quiet place.” He recalled even more vividly being obscenely drunk and unhappy over his heartbreak of that time, and the maudlin thoughts that had recurred to him over the years, like an unwanted guest slipping in through his doors: that there was no peace for such as he, no quiet place, and there never would be.Except he found himself remembering lying in bed with Alec—all of their clothes on, lounging on the bed on a lazy afternoon, Alec laughing, head thrown back, the marks Magnus had left on his throat very plain to see.
Sarah Rees Brennan
What are you doing?""I'm, uh, acting normal.""No you're not. You're acting like someone pretending to be normal. Stop pretending and start acting, but don't act like you're not pretending, that'll make it worse.
Derek Landy
I had good intentions once upon a time. Well, September.
Claire Hennessy
Emergency Valve Regulators," she repeated. "So you do know what your doing?"Not really," he said yanking another wire. 'I made up that term to keep you happy. I'm just pulling all the red wires because they're the pretty ones.
Derek Landy
We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. That first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two spent cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing.
John Banville
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool.
Oscar Wilde
There we go, that word again: faith. Pajo fuckin loves it. I fuckin hate it. I hate it cos there's no way o trickin yerself into it, no amount o thinkin about it can get yeh there - yeh have it or yeh don't. And I don't.
Trevor Byrne