Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 22

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.
Oscar Wilde
Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. 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
I make my way back whistling. Gerry nods towards Mrs Brady who is standing beside the trolleys.Morning, Mrs Brady, I say cheerfully.I push her provisions out to the car.Things are something terrible, she says. You can't trust anybody.No.It's come to a sorry pass.It has.There's hormones in the beef and tranquillizers in the bacon. There's men with breasts and women with mickeys. All from eating meat.Now.I steer a path between a crowd of people while she keeps step alongside.Can you believe it - they're feeding the pigs Valium. If you boil a bit of bacon you have to lie down afterwards. Dear oh dear.Yes, I nod.The thought of food makes me ill.The pigs are getting depressed in those sheds. If they get depressed they lose weight. So they tranquillize them. Where will it end?I don't know, Mrs Brady, I say. I begin filling the boot. That's why I started buying lamb. Then along came Chernobyl. Now you can't even have lamb stew or you'll light up at night! I swear. And when they've left you with nothing safe to eat, next thing they come along and tell you you can't live in your own house.I haven't heard of that one, Mrs Brady.Listen to me. She took my elbow. It could all happen that you're in your own house and the next thing is there's radiation bubbling under the floorboards.What?It comes right at you through the foundations. Watch the yogurts. Did you hear of th
Dermot Healy
at your weakest, you end up showing more strength; at your lowest, you are suddenly lifted higher than you’ve ever been. They all border one another, these opposites and show how quickly we can be altered.
Cecelia Ahern
Gosnell turned almost no one away from the Women’s Medical Society clinic. This is not meant as a compliment. Repentant Gosnell employee Adrienne Moton testified he would perform abortions on any girls or women with no concern about the age of their babies. The only times she could recall Gosnell refusing to perform an abortion was when somebody’s Social Security number couldn’t be verified. In those cases, Gosnell was worried that the “patient” was an undercover cop.
Ann McElhinney
Wait," said Butler. "Just wait, Holly. Artemis has a plan." He squinted through the green dome. "What is your plan, Artemis?"All Artemis could do was smile and shrug.
Eoin Colfer
For Dickinson as part of a middle-class community anxious about female creativity, self-assertion, self-expression, and egoism, Shakespeare and Stratford may have been emblems appropriate to her own task as a writer: to achieve literary renown but also authorial disappearance.
Paraic Finnerty
His eyes were closing again, all of their own accord, so that he lay in red, pain-filled darkness. It occured to him that he was dying and he didn’t care. ‘He’s alive!’ Blue said again ‘He’s breathing!’ ‘I can’t see him breathing.
Herbie Brennan
My sweet naughty girl I got your hot letter tonight and have been trying to picture you frigging your cunt in the closet. How do you do it? Do you stand against the wall with your hand tickling up under your clothes or do you squat down on the hole with your skirts up and your hand hard at work in through the slit of your drawers? Does it give you the horn now to shit? I wonder how you can do it. Do you come in the act of shitting or do you frig yourself off first and then shit? It must be a fearfully lecherous thing to see a girl with her clothes up frigging furiously at her cunt, to see her pretty white drawers pulled open behind and her bum sticking out and a fat brown thing stuck half-way out of her hole. You say you will shit your drawers, dear, and let me fuck you then. I would like to hear you shit them, dear, first and then fuck you. Some night when we are somewhere in the dark and talking dirty and you feel your shite ready to fall put your arms round my neck in shame and shit it down softly. The sound will madden me and when I pull up your dress.
James Joyce
Ah dearest heart if you will but waitI'll become the ideal soulmatenevermore causing you a moment's troubleand I but a mere ectoplasmic bubbleswaying above your gorgeous headgruff and garrulous and safely dead.
Christy Brown
I miss you so much in these wee morning hours,when the depth of the night sets my spirit free.When the forest is dark, and there doesn’t have to be anything in the worldbut the beauty I pull out of it.I miss you throughout the day,as I come across glories and wonders that could easily overwhelm me,but just dull because you’re not here to enjoy them.
Edward Fahey
He sits in an old armchair in the corner covered with bits of blankets and a bucket behind the chair that stinks enough to make you sick and when you look at that old man in the dark corner you want to get a hose with hot water and strip him and wash him down and give him a big feed of rashers and eggs and mashed potatoes with loads of butter and salt and onions.I want to take the man from the Boer War and the pile of rags in the bed and put them in a big sunny house in the country with birds chirping away outside the window and a stream gurgling.
Frank McCourt
There are certain things we owe our little sisters.
Claire Hennessy
Lovely Arra Sails,nectar to all males,how I'd like to spear you like a whaler spears a whale!
Darren Shan
You still awake?' asked the anesthetist.'Nope,' I replied.
Eoin Colfer
When a love comes to an end weaklings cry efficient ones instantly find another love and the wise already have one in reserve.
Oscar Wilde
If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.
Jonathan Swift
You're under arrest for multiple counts of murder. You have the right to not much at all, really. Do you have anything to say in your defense?
Derek Landy
You can’t take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall.
Tana French
The world is like a board with holes in it and the square men have got into the round holes and the round into the square.
Bishop Berkeley
Plenty of people think the same thing. All of them are teenagers, mentally if not physically. Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, gown men and women who’ve been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God.
Tana French
Journalism is unreadable, and literature is unread.
Oscar Wilde
To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was.
Samuel Beckett
It had ever, as I told the reader, been one of the singular blessings of my life, to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with some one....
Laurence Sterne
The hours we pass with happy prospects in view are more pleasing than those crowned with fruition.
Oliver Goldsmith
What is a life?" Scapegrace continued. "Is life merely living? Is it having a heartbeat? Or is life the effect you have on others? Is it the effect you have on the world around you? If so, what have I done with mine? How have I wasted it?
Derek Landy
They were on the side of the angels, even if the angels weren't entirely sure that this was a good thing.
John Connolly
I generally don’t become overexcited about things anyway, I’m just not one of those people.I’m not easily surprised by things either. I think it’s because I expect that anything can happen. That makes me sound like a believer and I’m not necessarily that either. I’ll phrase it better: I just accept things that happen. All things.
Cecelia Ahern
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
George Bernard Shaw
You forget what it was like. You'd swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst. How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.
Tana French
Throughout history--even a hundred years ago, even fifty--it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it's contentment,
Tana French
There comes a hush between darkness and day.Like expectation of a caress.A murmur of silence. Tree crests peeked down at Paulette through slowly lifting fog. Bark felt around for its texture again. Morning gathered and drifted through mere hints; through vague hopeful nuances of ‘Just maybe’.- From "The Gardens of Ailana" handbook for healers & mystics
Edward Fahey
The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination
George Bernard Shaw
I must be happy, he said, it is less pleasant than I should have thought.
Samuel Beckett
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.
Oscar Wilde
No matter what dimension you're in, there's a big-headed male trying to take over the world.
Eoin Colfer
The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.
George Bernard Shaw
And He watched over me before I knew Him and before I learned sense or even distinguished between good and evil.
St. Patrick
I realise people exist who don't read. But it's like I knew there were people who didn't breathe or eat: I can't imagine a life like that.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Take that rage, put it on a page, take the page to the stage, blow the roof off the place.
The Script
How could you...? How?""Logically you have no right to be angry. I simply followed your l
Eoin Colfer
Don't open the door to strangers," said her dad. "Unless they're selling something. Then open the door and see if I'd like it. If I'd like it, buy it for me. But nothing cheap. I have standards. Nothing too expensive, either. My standards aren't that high.
Derek Landy
I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old, the first pattern in them, and cherish them for that.
Sebastian Barry
That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.
Edna O'Brien
there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart
Iris Murdoch
The moment we pass out of our habits we lose all sense of permanency and routine.
George Moore
Peace will only come about through understanding and a relevant education.
Colin R. Turner
Some people just needed to be stolen from.
Eoin Colfer
What if the church should be less concerned with creating saints than creating a world where we do not need saints? A world where people like Mother Teresa and MLK would have nothing to do.
Peter Rollins
Conscience is a coward and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse.
Oliver Goldsmith
I... I don't, I don't think I can do this.""Do what?"It didn't answer."Do the tests?""I can't work with you when you're like this!" it blurted. "To every one of my specimens, I am the last thing they see! Terrror is what I am used to-- terror is what I like! I prefer my subjects to scream and beg, not ask to see results!""I'll scream my questions, if that helps.""It won't," it said sadly. "I'll know you're only trying to make me feel better.
Derek Landy
So with curious eyes and sick surmiseWe watched him day by day,And wondered if each one of usWould end the self-same way,For none can tell to what red HellHis sightless soul may stray.
Oscar Wilde
Die Welt ist von Narren geschaffen, damit Weise in ihr Leben.
Oscar Wilde
Use your health even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die do not outlive yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
She was well primed with a good load of Delahunt's port under her bellyband.
James Joyce
You’re crazy.”“No one sane is this awesome,” he said as he pointed a finger at himself
L.A. Casey
Experience is a question of instinct about life.
Oscar Wilde
You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.
Oscar Wilde
There he is then, the unfortunate brute, quite miserable because of me, for whom there is nothing to be done, and he so anxious to help, so used to giving orders and to being obeyed. There he is, ever since I came into the world, possibly at his instigation, I wouldn't put it past him, commanding me to be well, you know, in every way, no complaints at all, with as much success as if he were shouting at a lump of inanimate matter.
Samuel Beckett