Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 17

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.
Colum McCann
Success covers a multitude of blunders.
George Bernard Shaw
Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.
Sebastian Barry
Oh, China. How I have missed you.''And I have missed you, Eliza. But don't worry, next time my aim will be better.
Derek Landy
That time is long gone. But aren't we still the same people?
Donal Ryan
I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a visual memory for words ever succeeds in spelling conventionally, however highly educated he or she may be.
George Bernard Shaw
Joy is the will which labours which overcomes obstacles which knows triumph.
William Butler Yeats
Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways... Too often, people make the mistake of trying to use their art to capture a ghost, but only end up spreading their haunting to countless other people.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Curiosity is the hair of our habit tending to stand on end. It rarely happens that our attention is not stained in greater or lesser degree by this animal element.
Samuel Beckett
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw
Every dog must have his day.
Jonathan Swift
Yet, Malice never was his Aim;He lash'd the Vice but spar'd the Name. No individual could resent,Where thousands equally were meant. His Satry points at no Defect, But what all Mortals may correct...Verses on the death of Dr Swift
Jonathan Swift
We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.
Tana French
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.
Oscar Wilde
To work, her dumb lunge says,is to move a certain mass...through a certain distance,is to pull your weight and feelexact and equal to it.Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
Seamus Heaney
The only walls which bind us and stop us achieving our hearts desires are the walls we build for ourselves
Treasa Ni Ghulaa Clain
My mind couldn't fit itself around the shape of his absence.
Lia Mills
The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.
Oscar Wilde
Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.
William Trevor
By gnawing through a dyke even a rat may drown a nation.
Edmund Burke
The Right Honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.
R. B. Sheridan
As they say in New York, Get over it and, if you can't get over it, Get over talking about it.
Marian Keyes
Up and down' is Irish for anything at all--from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.
Anne Enright
I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.
John Connolly
You think Bernadette Maguire killed him?”“Uh… no. She’s, like I said, she’s old.”“Old people can kill people too.”“I know, but…”“She could be a ninja.”“She’s not a ninja, for God’s sake. She’s somebody’s great grandmother.”“I want you to think carefully about this, Kenny. Have you ever seen her with a sword?”“What?”“How about throwing stars?”“This is ridiculous.”“Have you ever seen her dressed up as a ninja? That would have been my first clue.”The girl sucked in her cheeks so she wouldn't laugh out loud.
Derek Landy
There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
Oscar Wilde
Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.
Flann O'Brien
So overjoyed were they at their deliverance that they laughed aloud, and the Earth seemed to them like a flower of silver, and the Moon like a flower of gold.
Oscar Wilde
No man is as anti-feminist as a really feminine woman.
Frank O'Connor
What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
W.B. Yeats
In the ghost house in the last days of the accident season, we were never going to die.
Moïra Fowley-Doyle
I rolled my eyes. "Just go get your tattoo before I change me mind, you dirty fuck."Alec waggled his eyebrows. "I'd give you a dirty fuck, kitten.
L.A. Casey
Where would we be without it, memory? Well, it'll never die here. Never in this country. We feed it too well.
Josephine Hart
It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.
George Bernard Shaw
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Oscar Wilde
Artemis looked at Holly and felt a tremendous affection for her... he could properly appreciate how fierce and beautiful his best friend was...She is truly magical, thought Artemis. Perhaps her qualities are more obvious to me now that I have decided to sacrifice myself.
Eoin Colfer
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Richard Steele
If Jana had been given to putting her thoughts into words, she might have told Laxmi that without someone to love,there was no reason to live.
Anne McCaffrey
Praise is the only gift for which people are really grateful.
Lady Marguerite Blessington
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!
John Anster
I cannot have chaos erupting around me until I am prepared for it. I am a collector. I am an observer. I don't participate. My resources, and my standing, must be secure before I can allow the uncertainty of war to crash down upon us.
Derek Landy
They loved him, or loved the thought of him, what they thought he was: a man who could easily have had a good life who chose instead their life: spite and bitterness and age-fogged glasses of watery whiskey in dark, cobwebbed country bars, shit-smeared toilets, blood-streaked piss, and early death. He could have helped it but didn't. They couldn't help it and loved him for being worse than them. He was the king of the wasters.
Donal Ryan
Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach, police grammar on the Internet.
Ruadhán J. McElroy
So the incompetents in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s state capital, knew or should have known that, even by their own lax rules, Gosnell should not have been carrying out abortions—but they didn’t care.
Ann McElhinney
In the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino put it as simply as possible. The mind, he said, tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, the materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need, he said, is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world.
Thomas Moore
SummerThe seasons between spring and autumn, comprising in the Northern Hemispherethe warmest months of the year: June, July and August. The period of finest development, perfection, or beauty previous to any decline; the summer of life.
Cecelia Ahern
Why did you shoot him?""You weren't around," I replied, my teeth gritted in pain. "If you'd been here I'd have shot you instead.
John Connolly
You can't have everything, I've often noticed it.
Samuel Beckett
[Charlie is dying:]After what seemed a long while, but hadn’t been, Marsh gave Paulette’s hand a warm and caring squeeze. “They’re here for him,” she said.But their heavenly visitors didn’t take him right away. They had to make room for the chaos of modern medical urgencies. To get out of the way of well-trained professionals who had dedicated their lives to holding back Heaven.Choppers are just as noisy and turbulent as we imagine them to be. One tore in over the hills and shattered every bit of peace Charlie otherwise could have lost himself into.In an instant the Med-Evac team was all over him. In the midst of that blatant orchestrated chaos Paulette fought to find her peace, and to hold him inside it.“Hang on, buddy,” techs kept telling him. “Don’t go leaving us now. You just hang in there.”But they didn’t understand, Paulette thought. It was his time.The chopper made a horrible racket carrying him off. Marsh, Paulette, and Ailana held their peace as its winds whipped their world into a froth.Harve’s face twisted with something that might conceivably have been rage.Then, all of a sudden, the birds sang, as though someone had given them a cue. “So that’s what it’s like,” Marsha said, very softly.“The afterlife.“My God, it’s so beautiful.
Edward Fahey
The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.
Edmund Burke
Philosophy is a good horse in the stable but an errant jade on a journey.
Oliver Goldsmith
The prevailing taste of the public for anecdote has been censured and ridiculed by critics, who aspire to the character of superior wisdom: but if we consider it in a proper point of view, this taste is an incontestible proof of the good sense and profoundly philosophic temper of the present times. Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labors!
Maria Edgeworth
Life is about the people we meet, and the experiences we have along the way.
Joanne Clancy
It always took my breath away,’ he said, ‘that the five of us could have found one another–against such odds, through all the layers of armored fortifications each of us had set up… Do you see now why I believe in miracles? I used to imagine time folding over, the shades of our future selves slipping back to the crucial moments to tap each of us on the shoulder and whisper: Look, there, look! That man, that woman: they’re for you; that’s your life, your future, fidgeting in that line, dripping on the carpet, shuffling in that doorway. Don’t miss it.
Tana French
It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.
Oscar Wilde
For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.
Oscar Wilde
Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
Oscar Wilde
Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss.
Oscar Wilde
In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?
Oscar Wilde
A face on him as long as a hare's back leg.
Myles na gCopaleen