Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 18

But no, now I see I never meant to Ben what Ben meant to me. If there was anything I said which resonated in return, he found a better speech elsewhere. My romance went no further than his coat.
Sara Baume
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
Oscar Wilde
To say that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic merit, is no better than to say he is rheumatic or diabetic.
James Joyce
If you have a dream, you want to at least be able to try to achieve it in some way. Something that is seemingly beyond your grasp but that you know that with a bit of hard work you could possibly achieve.
Cecelia Ahern
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw
I don't like it, but my hands are tied. I just want you to know this: if I ever get the chance to betray you, I will. If the opportunity arises to pay you back, I'll take it. You'll never be able to trust me.
Darren Shan
Keep your heart infinitesimally small and sorrow will never spy it, never plunge, never flap away with your heart in her claws.
Emma Donoghue
I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!
Oscar Wilde
Marriage is the gold standard of all relationships. It's the currency by which everything is valued.
Frank Delaney
But when I read, I am completely alone. I have privacy from her and from everyone.
Sarah Crossan
She has man's brain--a brain that a man should have were he much gifted--and woman's heart. The good God fashioned her for a purpose, believe me when He made that so good combination.
Bram Stoker
The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
Iris Murdoch
His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivided and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of revery to find himself in the midst of a new scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or allured and, whether alluring or disheartening, filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts. All the leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose jibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings.
James Joyce
I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.
John Banville
I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down.
Tana French
Foaly: Anyone see you come in here? Holly: The FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, MI6. Oh, and the EIB. Foaly: The EIB? Holly: (smirking) Everyone in the building.
Eoin Colfer
And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?
James Joyce
To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.
Tana French
The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers; but a moment's reflection will shew that this utilitarian application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the shedding of blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a mangy sheep or an ox with the rinderpest: it calls down divine wrath instead of appeasing it. In doing it we offer God as a sacrifice the gratification of our own revenge and the protection of our own lives without cost to ourselves; and cost to ourselves is the essence of sacrifice and expiation.
George Bernard Shaw
Being shot at for years by men of a particular nationality will tend to impact negatively upon one’s view of them.
John Connolly
After college, I started working in the gallery and found myself surrounded by a whole new set of people who had not yet grown accustomed to my antisocial tendencies, who had not yet learned to expect me to say no, and stopped asking. I was invited to go drinking and dancing again, and so, I tried.
Sara Baume
He took her hand in his and knelt before her. Valkyrie looked at him. He was serious. (...)'Dude, I'm sixteen.''I love you.''That doesn't make me any older. Stand up.''Not until you say yes.''You're going to shuffle around on your knees for the rest of your life? Stand up, for God's sake.''Be my wife.' 'Shut the hell up.
Derek Landy
Who're them?" says he to the curate."Them are the fallen angels," says the c
Eddie Lenihan
I saw myself as reviving a certain mode of life, a mode that had been almost lost: the contemplative life of the country gentleman, in harmony with his status and history. In Renaissance times they had called it sprezzatura. The idea was to do whatever one did with grace, to imbue one’s every action with beauty, while at the same time making it look quite effortless. Thus, if one were to work at, say, law, one should raise it to the level of an art; if one were to laze, then one must laze beautifully. This, they said, was the true meaning of being an aristocrat.
Paul Murray
There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Sometimes you must shed your skin to save it.
Emma Donoghue
A veil hangs between the two opposites, a mere slip of a thing that is transparent to warn us or comfort us. You hate now but look through this veil and see the possibility of love; you're sad now but look through to the other side and see happiness. Absolute composure to a complete mess - it happens so quickly, all in the blink of an eye.
Cecelia Ahern
Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
Oscar Wilde
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
George Bernard Shaw
There passed a child of four, a small girl on a footpath over the fields, going home in the evening to Erl. They looked at each other with round eyes."Hullo," said the child."Hullo, child of men," said the troll.. . . "What are you?" said the child."A troll of Elfland," answered the troll. "So I thought," said the child."Where are you going, child of men?" the troll asked."To the houses," the child replied."We don't want to go there," said the troll."N-no," said the child."Come to Elfland," the troll said.The child thought for a while. Other children had gone, and the elves always sent a changeling in their place, so that nobody quite missed them and nobody really knew. She thought awhile of the wonder and wildness of Elfland, and then of her own house."N-no," said the child."Why not?" said the troll."Mother made a jam roll this morning," said the child. And she walked on gravely home. Had it not been for that chance jam roll she had gone to Elfland."Jam!" said the troll contemptuously and thought of the tarns of Elfland, the great lily-leaves lying flat upon their solemn waters, the huge blue lilies towering into the elf-light above the green deep tarns: for jam this child had forsaken them!
Lord Dunsany
Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.
Colum McCann
Stairs," Valkyrie said, disappointed."Not just ordinary stairs," Skulduggery told her as he led the way down. "Magic stairs.""Really?""Oh, yes."She followed him into the darkness. "How are they magic?""They just are.""In what way?""In a magicky way."She glared at the back of his head. "They aren't magic at all, are they?""Not really.
Derek Landy
Now I've gone for too longLiving like I'm not aliveSo I'm going to start over tonightBeginning with you and I
Oscar Wilde
No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity's enormous momentum. I had nothing new to murmur to another on the subject of myself and not the smallest eagerness about being briefed on Danielle's supposedly unique trajectory—a curve described under the action, one could safely guess, of the usual material and maternal and soulful longings, a few thwarting tics of character, and luck good and bad. A life seemed like an old story.
Joseph O'Neill
History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same t —“troublous storms that tossThe private state, and render life unsweet.”These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.
Edmund Burke
The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness around me I feel less alone. (Pause.) In a way. (Pause.) I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to... (hesitates) ...me. (Pause.)
Samuel Beckett
Orion nodded, then asked, “Dwarf cheese?”“Cheese made by dwarfs.”“Oh,” said Orion, relieved. “They make it. It’s not actually . . .”“No. What a horrible thought.”“Exactly.
Eoin Colfer
Who or what inspires you?""I must admit that I often read my own articles in scientific journals and inspire myself.
Eoin Colfer
With a roof over his head he had ceased to work, living off his [war] pension and his wits, both hopelessly inadequate.
Spike Milligan
The weapon of memory, turned on the self, is an apocalyptic sword.
Josephine Hart
Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.
Edna O'Brien
I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.
Sebastian Barry
Better overcautious than missing a jugular vein, as the saying goes."That was a very morbid saying. Maybe only vampire said it.
Sarah Rees Brennan
In the end, it's only a story of having had her words and secrets, her confidences, turned against her by someone she once believed entirely beyond any acts of betrayal. A story of pettiness and cruelty and of the lies friends will tell when a friendship has ceased to be profitable or convenient. It is a very simple and inexpressibly complex story of cowardice...
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Philosophy has a fine saying for everything - for Death it has an entire set.
Laurence Sterne
Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.
Lord Dunsany
Law and justice are not the same.
John Connolly
All men that are ruined are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.
Edmund Burke
Here's lumbos. Where misties swaddlum, where misches lodge none, where mystries pour kind on, O sleepy! So be yet!
James Joyce
This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." (1794)]
Edmund Burke
A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.
Elizabeth Bowen
Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.
Oscar Wilde
Cad é an mhaith dom eagla a bheith orm? Ní shaorfadh eagla duine ón mbás, dar ndóigh.
Peig Sayers
Personally of course I regret everything.Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need,not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy,not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust,not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear,not a name, not a face, no time, no place...that I do not regret, exceedingly.An ordure, from beginning to end.
Samuel Beckett
Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel.
William Trevor
It was a trap. It was so obviously a trap.Darquesse smiled.
Derek Landy
They love each other, marry (in order to love each other better, more conveniently). He goes to the wars, he dies at the wars. She weeps (with emotion) at having loved him, at having lost him. (Yep!) Marries again (in order to love again, more conveniently again). They love each other. (You love as many timesas necessary - as necessary in order to be happy.) He come back (the other comes back) from the wars: he didn't die at the wars after all. She goes tothe station, to meet him. He dies in the train (of emotion) at the thought of seeing her again, having her again. She weeps (weeps again, with emotionagain) at having lost him again. (Yep!) Goes back to the house. He's dead - the other is dead. The mother-in-law takes him down: he hanged himself (with emotion) at the thought of losing her. She weeps (weeps louder) at having loved him, at having lost him.
Samuel Beckett
Some men never recover from education.
Oliver St. John Gogarty
When you‟re taught from birth that you don‟t matter in any way, that your wants and even needs are irrelevant, then of course you‟ll struggle to value yourself.
Danu Morrigan