Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 19

It was the most perfect moment in my life.It was the last perfect moment in my life.
Cecelia Ahern
Deary me, boys, why? Why would someone with so much going for him have... have... ended it all in the way he appears to have done? 'Oh father, you see, it could be for any number of reasons ,' Andy said, serious and fluent, as if he was an expert on the subject. 'Personally I think it's a miracle that any of us survives.' What do you mean? said the Priest.'I mean' continued Andy, 'there's this one moment as you're growing up when the world suddenly feels more or less pointless- when the terribleness of reality lands on you, like something falling from the sky.''Something falling? Like what? asked Father Frank, trying his best.'Something big, like a piano, say, or a fridge. And when that happens, there's no going back to the time when it hadn't landed on you.'‘But what about the pleasures and the joy and the purpose, like sport, music, girls and the like?’ Father Frank was nearly pleading now.‘Fiction,’ sighed Andy. ‘Mirages in the desert of life, to make people feel like it might be worth it.’ ‘Oh,’ said Father Frank. ‘Oh I see, and do all you youngsters get this feeling?’‘Yes, I think so,’ said Andy, not even asking anyone else for their opinion, but most of us learn to live with it.’‘Well that’s a relief, I suppose.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
It is only when a man feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understand their true import.
Bram Stoker
You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.
Oscar Wilde
The ages live in history through their anachronisms.
Oscar Wilde
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
George Bernard Shaw
The English language is the tongue now current in England and her colonies throughout the world and also throughout the greater part of the United States of America. It sprang from the German tongue spoken by the Teutons, who came over to Britain after the conquest of that country by the Romans. These Teutons comprised Angles, Saxons, Jutes and several other tribes from the northern part of Germany. They spoke different dialects, but these became blended in the new country, and the composite tongue came to be known as the Anglo-Saxon which has been the main basis for the language as at present constituted and is still the prevailing element.
Joseph Devlin
The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.Take off from here.
Seamus Heaney
O summer and soft wind. Relieves the heart and makes living cheaper.
J.P. Donleavy
It's strange but as I grow older, I find myself developing more optimism. I keep inching toward the point where I believe that it's more difficult to have hope than it is to embrace cynicism. In the deep dark end, there's no point unless we have at least a modicum of hope. We trawl our way through the darkness hoping to find a pinpoint of light. But isn't it remarkable that the cynics of this world—the politicians, the corporations, the squinty-eyed critics—seem to think that they have a claim on intelligence? They seem to think that it's cooler, more intellectually engaging, to be miserable, that there's some sort of moral heft in cynicism. But I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who are prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small.
Colum McCann
There is no such thing as magic. It is a word. A silly, foolish, overused word. There is only your aura...or the Chinese have a better word for it: qi. A life force. An energy. This is the energy that flows within you. It can be shaped, molded, directed.
Michael Scott
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
Oscar Wilde
I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know.
Niall Williams
You don't know, oh, ohYou don't know you're beautiful.
One Direction
In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.
Oscar Wilde
Whatever you can do or think you can begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Goethe.
Nesta Tuomey
Great leaders lead by example, not by making an example of others.
Stewart Stafford
Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.
Samuel Beckett
In a way winter is the real spring the time when the inner things happen the resurge of nature.
Edna O'Brien
They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.
Colum McCann
Let my country die for me.
James Joyce
Life at times loses its sense of reality; it appears to us like a weird, optical illusion - a phantasmagoric bubble that will disappear at the slightest breath.
Oscar Wilde
My eyes were closed, they're open now
Damien Rice
For people who live on expectations to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
Elizabeth Bowen
Daffy bent down suddenly, and picked a small startled white flower. "Anemone," he said, handing it over; he made her repeat the word until she had it right. "Find me a silk to match that.
Emma Donoghue
It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch defrauded of its dearest pledges: and to reflect upon so many agreeable females with rich jointures, a prey for the vilest bonzes, who hide their flambeau under a bushel in an uncongenial cloister or lose their womanly bloom in the embraces of some unaccountable muskin when they might multiply the inlets of happiness, sacrificing the inestimable jewel of their sex when a hundred pretty fellows were at hand to caress, this, he assured them, made his heart weep.
James Joyce
Yorkshire had none of the color I'd known in Cape Town- the vivid pinks and purples of the freesias and arum lilies in the flower sellers' baskets. Yorkshire had none of the fragrant floral perfume, or the tang of salt in the air from the ocean.
Hazel Gaynor
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
Iris Murdoch
When I was young I thought money was the most important thing in life. Now that I'm old - I know it is.
Oscar Wilde
One day, my father said there was nothing outside infinity. He said the universe was like a cardboard box with God sitting outside surrounded by light, but I wanted to know if maybe God was sitting inside another cardboard box with the light on, and how could anyone be sure how many cardboard boxes there are.
Hugo Hamilton
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
George Bernard Shaw
It was no time for mercy, it was time to terminate with extreme prejudice.
Eoin Colfer
Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.
Jonathan Swift
The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.
Oscar Wilde
No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression.
James Connolly
What is it with science these days? Everyone is so quick to believe in it, in all these new scientific discoveries, new pills for this, new pills for that. Get thinner, grow hair, yada, yada, yada, but when it requires a little faith in something you all go crazy.' He shook his head, 'If miracles had chemical equations then everyone would believe.
Cecelia Ahern
Home isn't a place, its a feeling
Cecelia Ahern
The pair smiled desperately at one another. And for the first time ever, despite the fact that everyone he knew - even the gods themselves - would condemn him for it, Jebel didn't think of Tel Hesani as a slave, but as an equal.
Darren Shan
The thing about a diversion is that it has to be diverting.
Eoin Colfer
Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-sniffing loser shunned by society, or a psycho planning to return to college with an automatic weapon and a backpack full of ammo.
Michael Foley
A faith that can only exist in the light of victory and certainty is one which really affirms the self while pretending to affirm Christ, for it only follows Jesus in the belief that Jesus has conquered death. Yet a faith that can look at the horror of the cross and still say ‘yes’ is one that says ‘no’ to the self in saying ‘yes’ to Christ.
Peter Rollins
Poverty is a funny phenomenon. It is always defined financially and always relative to what other people earn. It is possible to be extremely happy despite having little money and being officially categorised as poverty-stricken. You can also be really unhappy despite earning a high salary. Those who always want something more will always live in poverty, regardless of how much they earn, while those who are content with what they have will always feel they have an abundance. Most poverty in the UK isn't material poverty, it's spiritual poverty, a state of mind in which fulfilment comes only from the pursuit of material gain.
Mark Boyle
It is terrible to be an unprotected being.
Colm Tóibín
If the poor man cannot always get meat the rich man cannot always digest it.
Henry Giles
And yet this self, containsTides, continents and stars―a myriad selves,Is small and solitary as one grass-bladePassed over by the windAmongst a myriad grasses on the prairie.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Virtue like a dowerless beauty has more admirers than followers.
Lady Marguerite Blessington
It is not the task of a writer to 'tell all,' or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that's the bastard chimera we call a 'story.' I am not building, but cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from the objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away. A pound of flesh. A pile of sawdust. Discarded chips of Carrara marble. And what's left over."Houses Under The Sea
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abru
Colm Tóibín
In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thing like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.
Emma Donoghue
We are off! And do we know it, not just because the world is yelling "Lift-off" in our ears, but because the seats of our pants tell us so! Trust your instruments, not your body, the modern pilot is always told, but this beast is best felt. Shake, rattle and roll!
Michael Collins
Could the entire notion of finding one’s soul mate be a simple case of looking for ourselves in another body? Is the “soul mate” really just the best approximation of ourselves that we can find?
Dermot Davis
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.
Edmund Burke
Those whom the gods love grow young.
Oscar Wilde
Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.
Oscar Wilde
It is good to be taught humility when we are young. If we do not exeperience pain as children, we will cause pain as adults.
Darren Shan
There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dénouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display.
Oscar Wilde
And I'm not saying it's a bad song, you know, or anything like that. All I'm saying is that if you get, I don't know, a broom, say, and dip it in some brake fluid, put the other end up my arse, stick me on a trampoline in a moving lift, and I would write a better song on the walls. That's all I'm saying.
Dylan Moran
Making a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as she can make it feel.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: … But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I'm neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.(Act I., lines 132-140)
Oscar Wilde
—all I can say of the matter, is—That he has either a pumkin for his head—or a pippin for his heart,—and whenever he is dissected 'twill be found so.
Laurence Sterne