Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 21

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.
George Bernard Shaw
Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.
Oscar Wilde
Fear's useless. Either something bad happens or it doesn't: If it doesn't, you've wasted time being afraid, and if it does, you've wasted time that you could have spent sharpening your weapons.
Sarah Rees Brennan
To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart
W.B. Yeats
Peace is not only better than war but infinitely more arduous.
George Bernard Shaw
Journalism classes teach us that one must extract oneself from the story in order to report without bias, but often we need to be in the story in order to understand, to connect, to help the audience identify or else it has no heart; it could be a robot telling the story, for all anyone cares.
Cecelia Ahern
Amo amas amat amamus amatis amant amavi amavisti amavit amavimus amavistis amaverunt amavero amaveris amaverit… Everything was love. Everything will be love. Everything has been love. Everything would be love. Everything would have been love. Ah, that was it, the truth at last. Everything would have been love. The huge eye, which had become an immense sphere, was gently breathing, only it was not an eye nor a sphere but a great wonderful animal covered in little waving legs like hairs, waving oh so gently as if they were under water. All shall be well and all shall be well said the ocean. So the place of reconciliation existed after all, not like a little knot hole in a cupboard but flowing everywhere and being everything. I had only to will it and it would be, for spirit is omnipotent only I never knew it, like being able to walk on the air. I could forgive. I could be forgiven. I could forgive. Perhaps that was the whole of it after all. Perhaps being forgiven was just forgiving only no one had ever told me. There was nothing else needful. Just to forgive. Forgiving equals being forgiven, the secret of the universe, do not whatever you do forget it. The past was folded up and in the twinkling of an eye everything had been changed and made beautiful and good.
Iris Murdoch
JACKThat is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won't want to know Bunbury.ALGERNONThen your wife will. You don't seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none.JACKThat, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years.ALGERNONYes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time.
Oscar Wilde
Listen to me," Audra said. "Listen good. You don't get to touch me anymore. Not ever. You don't own me, or my children. We are not your possessions. You never really loved our children, but I do. Now, I'm going to find Sean and Louise. You can either help me or get out of my way. Which is it?
Haylen Beck
Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.
George Bernard Shaw
When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be.
Oscar Wilde
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast
Oscar Wilde
The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.
Oscar Wilde
In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.
Edna O'Brien
Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it....
George Bernard Shaw
If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
Oscar Wilde
What fire does not destroy, it hardens
Oscar Wilde
[E]verywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.
Emma Donoghue
My mother likes odd numbers and is suspicious of the even ones. She reads a new book every week and is bewitched by black holes in the universe. She describes herself as an optimist but she worries about everything—worries incessantly—worries on behalf of others when she feels they are not worrying adequately for themselves.And my mother misses her own mother, my grandmother, immensely, who only has a past now; who is only allowed to be as we remember her.
Sara Baume
That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.
Oscar Wilde
Trust is nothing when you have it. It's bread and milk. Basic. There's no glamour, no emotion, no drama - you just trust and that's it. Trusting someone is boring. It's a non-event. But take it away - try living without trust and suddenly your relationship is plunged into a living hellhole.
Kate Kerrigan
That which attracts the world must please and pander to the self-importance of man. The world itself is a vain show, and likes its own. Consequently there is nothing which so carries the mass of men along with it as that which flatters the vanity of the human mind. It may assume the lowliest air, but sinful man seeks his own honour and present exaltation.
William Kelly
And the young Fisherman said to himself: "How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.
Oscar Wilde
Just as when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.
Cecelia Ahern
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
James Joyce
The month of May is the pleasant time; its face is beautiful; the blackbird sings his full song, the living wood is his holding, the cuckoos are singing and ever singing; there is a welcome before the brightness of the summer.
Lady Gregory
LADY BRACKNELLThirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. Lady Dumbleton is an instance in point. To my own knowledge she has been thirty-five ever since she arrived at the age of forty, which was many years ago now.
Oscar Wilde
Writing is the spectrum through which the chaos of life can be seen, studied and understood.
Stewart Stafford
What would killing the Elders result in?" "Panic? Fear? Three empty parking spaces in the Sanctuary?
Derek Landy
Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.
George Bernard Shaw
The first time you view a house, you see how pretty the paint is and buy it. The second time you look to see if the basement has termites. It's the same with men.
Claudia Carroll
She bid me take love easy as the leaves grow on the tree But I being young and foolish with her would not agree.
William Butler Yeats
Want me to flex my magic for you, baby?
Sarah Rees Brennan
When men grow virtuous in their old age they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.
Jonathan Swift
The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
George Bernard Shaw
Which college?''Hmm?''Which college do you go to?'Fletcher nodded. 'Yes.''I'm sorry?''Oh,' Fletcher said, and laughed.Valkyrie's parents looked at Fletcher in near bewilderment. Fletcher looked back at them in total bewilderment. Valkyrie shook her head.
Derek Landy
When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.
Frank Delaney
Philosophy ... should not pretend to increase our present stock but make us economists of what we are possessed of.
Oliver Goldsmith
But I know I will do neither; nothing. I have all the time in the world, and yet, I can't be bothered.
Sara Baume
Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world - though the cant of hypocrites ihay be the worst - the cant of criticism is the most tormenting.
Laurence Sterne
A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.
Oscar Wilde
Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.
Jonathan Swift
My heart feels not so much in my chest as in my hands. I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside me.
Claire Keegan
Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid.Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd.
Oscar Wilde
My only policy is to profess evil and do good.
George Bernard Shaw
He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast.
James Joyce
He was a man of most subtle and refined intellect. A man of culture, charm, and distinction. One of the most intellectual men I ever met.""I prefer a gentlemanly fool any day. There is more to be said for stupidity than people imagine. Personally I have a great admiration for stupidity. It is a sort of fellow-feeling, I suppose.
Oscar Wilde
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
Oscar Wilde
But don't they say that all is fair in love and war? I heard that somewhere.""'They?' Who are 'they?'""I don't know. Just people.""That's what the victorious claim, not the defeated; the powerful, not the powerless. 'All is fair.' 'The end justifies the means.' Is that what you believe?
John Connolly
...fairy tales, just a fancy word for lies...
Cecelia Ahern
You are afraid to die?'Yes, everyone is.'But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together. Girls are caterpillars when they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structures.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Look!" said Foaly, pointing with some urgency into the vast steel-gray gloom, "Someone who cares!
Eoin Colfer
People see a Macbeth film. They imagine they have seen Macbeth, and don't want to see it again; so when your Mr. Hackett or somebody comes round to act the play, he finds the house empty. That is what has happened to dozens of good plays whose authors have allowed them to be filmed. It shall not happen to mine if I can help it.
George Bernard Shaw
The door handle turned. Someone knocked, and a man's voice called, "Uh, hello?"Valkyrie looked at Skulduggery, looked back at the others, looked at Skulduggery again."Hello," Skulduggery said, speaking loudly to be heard over the alarm. "Hi," said the man. "The door's locked.""Is it?""Yes.""That's funny" said Skulduggery. "Hold on a moment." He reached out, jiggled the handle a few times, then stepped back. "Yes, it's locked. You wouldn't happen to have the key, would you?"There was a delay in response from the other side. "I'm sorry," the man called, "Who am I speaking
Derek Landy
The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.
Oscar Wilde
...we have seen that the priests regard the state as an enemy to be exploited, it is only natural that our politicians do likewise. Thus, although patriotism is held in greater esteem in this country than in any other country in the world, there is no other country in the world where patriotism is less in evidence among politicians and among the general mass of the community. For patriotism and the state are so closely allied that love of one is necessarily love of the other. And if any man considers the state an enemy and an institution to be exploited, it follows naturally that he is no patriot. Thus the amazed tourist will see that it is very fashionable for Irish politicians who are not in the government to denounce the government and then when they get into the government it is equally fashionable for them to use the powers of government for the purpose of robbing the country.
Liam O'Flaherty
To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand—that is art.
James Joyce
Memories are important, like the bones of the mind. We build ourselves upon them, flesh and blood moulded around the pictures of what is past.
Paul Kearney
The whole world is strewn with snares traps gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.
George Bernard Shaw
It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things.
Oscar Wilde