Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 14

This morning, the sun endures past dawn. I realise that it is August: the summer's last stand.
Sara Baume
Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.
Iris Murdoch
You are on your back at the foot of an aspen. In its trembling shade. She at right angles propped on her elbows head between her hands. Your eyes opened and closed have looked in hers looking in yours. In your dark you look in them again. Still. You feel on your face the fringe of her long black hair stirring in the still air. Within the tent of hair your faces are hidden from view. She murmurs, Listen to the leaves. Eyes in each other's eyes you listen to the leaves. In their trembling shade.
Samuel Beckett
As God can protect his people under the greatest despotism, so the utmost civil liberty is no safety to them without the immediate protection of his Almighty arm. I fear that Christians in this country have too great a confidence in political institutions . . . [rather] than of the government of God.
Alexander Carson
Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.
William Butler Yeats
This is the place where death rejoices to help those who live. It's written somewhere in every morgue I've ever been in. Nice way of looking at it, isn't it?
Jane Casey
Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.
Oscar Wilde
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Oscar Wilde
Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw
When we’ve decided to tell the truth in a story, we should tell good, strong versions of it, proper versions that kids can do something with.
Celine Kiernan
The world loves the Saint, and Christ loves the sinner.
Oscar Wilde
Perhaps the relevant truth- and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me-is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.
Joseph O'Neill
It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.
Oscar Wilde
Perfection is an illusion. Yet perfectionists demand it from others while being far from flawless themselves. The margin of error of the human condition is often our greatest area of excellence and discovery.
Stewart Stafford
Difference is the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth, and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace: respect for diversity.
John Hume
Not like a heart, which let people in without permission, held them in a special place she never had any say in and then yearned for them to remain there longer than they planned.
Cecelia Ahern
[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
George Bernard Shaw
I am Butler. Anything I say sounds scary.
Eoin Colfer
A glass is good and a lass is good And a pipe to smoke in cold weather The world is good and the people are good And we're all good fellows together.
John O'Keeffe
take a strict view of their excrements, and, from the colour, the odour, the taste, the consistence, the crudeness or maturity of digestion, form a judgment of their thoughts and designs; because men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at stool...
Jonathan Swift
At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.
George Bernard Shaw
Hearts Live By Being Wounded
Oscar Wilde
What bothered me was all of the time he wasted by drumming, and all the time I wasted by listening to him drum, by taking pleasure in it, for pleasure is almost always a waste of time.
Sara Baume
Our laws make law impossible our liberties destroy all freedom our property is organized robbery our morality an impudent hypocrisy our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes our power wielded by cowards and weaklings and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons.
George Bernard Shaw
To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.
Oscar Wilde
I have my moments,” he mused.“They’re few and far between,” Icountered, grinning
L.A. Casey
tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play— I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.
Oscar Wilde
I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile.
George Bernard Shaw
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
Oscar Wilde
Stop thinking like Alice in Wonderland, Celia told herself sternly. You're a grown-up, it's no use shutting your eyes, wishing things would happen
Maeve Binchy
I am as you say a "skeleton" and i have been for quite a while
SkullDuggery Pleasant
You can't live life being second best.
Alex Trimble performed by Two Door Cinema Club
Demons never die quietly, and a week ago the storm was a proper demon, sweeping through the Caribbean after her long ocean crossing from Africa, a category five when she finally came ashore at San Juan before moving on to Santo Domingo and then Cuba and Florida. But now she's grown very old, as her kind measures age, and these are her death throes. So she holds tightly to this night, hanging on with the desperate fury of any dying thing, any dying thing that might once have thought itself invincible.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
I learned something important that night. You shouldn’t try to stop everything from happening. Sometimes you’re supposed to feel awkward. Sometimes you’re supposed to be vulnerable in front of people. Sometimes it’s necessary because it’s all part of you getting to the next part of yourself, the next day.
Cecelia Ahern
I kind of thought actually that Trevor was gone completely mental when he called up here a few weeks ago. Like, why would he not text or email or Facebook? What's with all the reality, I thought. Does he not know he's a million times cooler in virtual form?
Donal Ryan
With slouch and swing around the ringWe trod the Fools’ Parade!We did not care: we knew we wereThe Devils’ Own Brigade:And shaven head and feet of leadMake a merry masquerade.
Oscar Wilde
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Oscar Wilde
In heaven an angel is no one in particular.
George Bernard Shaw
It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity, But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.
Oscar Wilde
But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.
Oscar Wilde
Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends’ secret places.
Tana French
I found it idiotically distressing that a sharp finger whistle could no longer summon them outdoors into a playful twilight. An ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to make nothing less than a mortal action. The suspicion came to me for the fist time that they were figures of my dreaming, like the loved dead: my mother and all these vanished boys. And after Mama's cremation I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one's dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead.
Joseph O'Neill
To be always what I am - and so changed from what I was.
Samuel Beckett
Tis an old maxim in the schools That flattery's the food of fools - Yet now and then your men of wit Will condescend to take a bit.
Jonathan Swift
I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result.
Oscar Wilde
People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.
Oscar Wilde
It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.
Oscar Wilde
God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.
Iris Murdoch
Yesterday was a closed book, tomorrow, however, was another story.
Cecelia Ahern
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. World's had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow...
Oscar Wilde
The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her latest wonder.
Oscar Wilde
Dancy closes her eyes, remembering all the times that have been so much worse than this, all the horror and shame and sorrow to give her strength. The burning parts of her no one and nothing can ever touch, the fire where her soul used to be.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Evil, unlike good, is constantly at war with those most like itself, and ambition is its spur.
John Connolly
—I won't go about to argue the point with you,—'tis so,—and I am persuaded of it, madam, as much as can be, "That both man and woman bear pain or sorrow, (and, for aught I know, pleasure too) best in a horizontal position.
Laurence Sterne
The arts that have escaped [uniformity] best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.
Oscar Wilde
Numbers are the only things you can trust in this life, Kerstin; they will keep you sane.’Summer Lies Bleeding
Nuala Casey
Must I accept the barren Gift?-learn death, and lose my Mastery?Then let them know whose blood and breathwill take the Gift and set them free:whose is the voice and whose the mindto set at naught the well-sung Game-when finned Finality arrivesand calls me by my secret Name.Not old enough to love as yet,but old enough to die, indeed--the death-fear bites my throat and heart,fanged cousin to the Pale One's breed.But past the fear lies life for all-perhaps for me: and, past my dread,past loss of Mastery and life,the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!Lone Power, I accept your Gift!Freely I make death a part of me;By my accept it is boundinto the lives of all the Sea-yet what I do now binds to ita gift I feel of equal worth:I take Death with me, out of Time,and make of it a path, a birth!Let the teeth come! As they tear me,they tear Your ancient hate for aye--so rage, proud Power! Fail again,and see my blood teach Death to die!
Diane Duane
. . . try as we may we cannot get behind things to the reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no reality in things apart from their appearances.
Oscar Wilde
Neither your mother nor I have any imagination at all and we certainly didn't bring you up to have one
John Boyne
I should have shouted "No" and left him. "But at least" said Satan in the deeps of my mind, "know what the temptation is before you do anything hastily.
Lord Dunsany