Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 13

We're all weird.
John O'Callaghan
People are talking about immigration, emigration and the rest of the fucking thing. It's all fucking crap. We're all human beings, we're all mammals, we're all rocks, plants, rivers. Fucking borders are just such a pain in the fucking arse.
Shane MacGowan
I’ve learned that to be courageous is to feel fear within, every step of the way. Courage does not take over, it fights and struggles through every word you say and every step you take. It’s a battle or a dance as to whether to let it pervade. It takes courage to overcome, but it takes extreme fear to be courageous.
Cecelia Ahern
A dark horse riderless, bolts like a phantom past the winning post, his mane moonflowing, his eyeballs stars.
James Joyce
Then we still have time!” I gasp. “It’s not too late. We know what he’s going to do. We’ll return to the cave and figh
Darren Shan
And if ever I'm reduced to looking for a meaning to my life, you never can tell, it's in that old mess I'll stick my nose to begin with, the mess of that poor old uniparous whore and myself the last of my foul brood, neither man nor beast.
Samuel Beckett
a grin that wasn't natural, and that combined in a strange way affection and arrogance, the arrogance of the idealist who doesn't realize how easily he can be fooled.
Frank O'Connor
The whiskey kicked like a mugger.
Ken Bruen
A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.
George Bernard Shaw
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Edmund Burke
The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
Colum McCann
We're at a crucial point in history. We cannot have fast cars, computers the size of credit cards, and modern conveniences, whilst simultaneously having clean air, abundant rainforests, fresh drinking water and a stable climate. This generation can have one or the other but not both. Humanity must make a choice. Both have an opportunity cost. Gadgetry or nature? Pick the wrong one and the next generations may have neither.
Mark Boyle
A CD. How quaint. We have these in museums.
Eoin Colfer
Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
George Bernard Shaw
… in these new days and in these new pages a philosophical tradition of the spontaneity of speculation kind has been rekindled on the sacred isle of Éire, regardless of its creative custodian never having been taught how to freely speculate, how to profoundly question, and how to playfully define. Spontaneity of speculation being synonymous with the philosophical-poetic, the philosophical-poetic with the rural philosopher-poet, and by roundelay the rural philosopher-poet thee with the spontaneity of speculation be. And by the way of the rural what may we say? A philosopher-poet of illimitable space we say. Iohannes Scottus Ériugena the metaphor of old salutes you; salutes your lyrical ear and your skilful strumming of the rippling harp. (Source: Hearing in the Write, Canto 19, Ivy-muffled)
Richard McSweeney
His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices.
Oscar Wilde
Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.
George Bernard Shaw
Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.
Patrick Cockburn
I wish you would tell me your secret. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
Oscar Wilde
Though the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see,Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me;In exile thy bosom shall still be my home,And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam.
Thomas Moore
Fe es aquello que nos permite creer en cosas que sabemos que no son ciertas.
Bram Stoker
He was shivering like a Wicklow sheepdog in a snowy yard, though the weather was officially 'clement'.The first layer of clothing was his jacket, the second his shirt, the third his long-johns, the fourth his share of lice, the fifth his share of fear.
Sebastian Barry
I'm a million different things every day of the week.
Cecelia Ahern
It is a curious fact that small boys are more terrified of their babysitters than small girls are. In part, this is because small girls and babysitters, who are usually slightly larger girls, belong to the same species, and therefore understand each other. Small boys, on the other hand, do not understand girls, and therefore being looked after by one is a little like a hamster being looked after by a shark. If you are a small boy, it may be some consolation to you to know that even large boys do not understand girls, and girls, by and large, do not understand boys. This makes adult life very interesting.
John Connolly
Western doctors are like poor plumbers. They treat a splashing tube by cleaning up the water. These plumbers are extremely apt at drying up the water, constantly inventing new, expensive, and refined methods of drying up water. Somebody should teach them how to close the tap.
Denis Parsons Burkitt
If we take care of the moments the years will take care of themselves.
Maria Edgeworth
We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's a chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.
Colum McCann
The soul ... has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
James Joyce
I’d begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.
Mark O'Connell
We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
John Banville
Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.
Oscar Wilde
There’s an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don’t notice at what point that you’re actually overwhelmed by this. There’s no showiness, at all. It’s the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have a notion of where the beauty was.(Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.)
Colm Tóibín
Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them one by one as she sailed past on her orbit, have little time to waste on such things as magic and so cannot tell you how the sword was made, and those who know whence poetry is, and the need that man has for song, or know any one of the fifty branches of magic, have little time to waste on such things as science, and so cannot tell you whence its ingredients came. Enough that it was once beyond our Earth and was now here amongst our mundane stones; that it was once but as those stones, and now had something in it such as soft music has; let those that can define it.
Lord Dunsany
the important thing is not what we (look) like,but the role we play in our best friend's life.
Cecelia Ahern
But jealousy is a dreadful thing, Jessica. It is the most natural to us of the really wicked passions and it goes deep and envenoms the soul. It must be resisted with every honest cunning and with the deliberate thinking of generous thoughts, however abstract and empty these may seem in comparison with that wicked strength... There is no merit, Jessica, in a faithfulness which is poison to you and captivity to him.
Iris Murdoch
She is a peacock in everything but beauty!
Oscar Wilde
The Number our envious Persons, confirmation our capability.
Oscar Wilde
Be the kind of woman who, when your feet hit the floor each morning, the devil says "Oh, no! She's up.
Joanne Clancy
Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
Oscar Wilde
The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see.
Sebastian Barry
That is the problem with being twelve. All the grown-ups think they have a right to know your business.
Paul Kearney
We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us.
Edmund Burke
They say the path of true love never runs smooth. Well, Luke and my true love's path didn't run at all, it limped along in new boots that were chafing its heels. Blistered and cut, red and raw, every hopping, lopsided step, a little slice of agony.
Marian Keyes
and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
James Joyce
I remember everything about it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Men so sick they are dying of death.
Sebastian Barry
Love in France is a comedy in England a tragedy in Italy an opera seria and in Germany a melodrama.
Marguerite Blessington
The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea.
Sebastian Barry
To cry was to release all sorts of ugly little pressures and tensions. Like waking out of a long, dark dream to a sun-filled day.
Anne McCaffrey
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,Enwrought with golden and silver light,The blue and the dim and the dark clothsOf night and light and the half light,I would spread the cloths under your feet:But I, being poor, have only my dreams;I have spread my dreams under your feet;Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B. Yeats
One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.
Oscar Wilde
The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.
Samuel Beckett
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.
Oscar Wilde
If you take goodwill for granted and get sloppy, you might get away with it once or twice, but you won't get away with it for ever. You should always treat the things that treat you good with respect, because otherwise you will suffer for it. More important than that is the fact that it's just the right thing to do.
Kate Kerrigan
I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
Oscar Wilde
You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.
Frank McCourt
And Jabim is the Lord of broken things, who sitteth behind the house to lament the things that are cast away. And there he sitteth lamenting the broken things until the worlds be ended, or until someone cometh to mend the broken things. Or sometimes he sitteth by the river's edge to lament the forgotten things that drift upon it.A kindly god is Jabim, whose heart is sore if anything be lost.
Lord Dunsany
After all there is but one race - humanity.
George Moore
And a young prince must be prudent like that,giving freely while his father livesso that afterwards, in age when fighting startssteadfast companions will stand by himand hold the line.
Seamus Heaney
Where has Arnold been?’ I said. ‘... the Westwoods get in the papers.’‘Patting the orphans.’‘Getting homes for the homeless.’‘Legs for the legless.’ She was laughing as she said it.‘Blind dogs,’ I said. ‘Dogs for the blind, that is.’‘Patting blind dogs.’ We both laughed and drank. ‘Getting legs for them.’‘Homes for legless, blind orphan dogs.’ Maybe we were both a little drunk, on bourbon or on the past.
James Ferron Anderson