Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 23

I am a Christian - but sometimes I feel very removed from Christianity. The Jesus Christ that I believe in was the man who turned over the tables in the temple and threw the money-changers out - substitute T.V. evangelists if you like…why in the West, do we spend so much money on extending the arms race instead of wiping out malaria, which could be eradicated given ten minutes worth of the world's arm budget? To me, we are living in the most un-Christian times. When I see these racketeers, the snake-oil salesmen on these right-winged television stations, asking for not your $20.00, or your $50.00, but your $100.00 in the name of Jesus Christ, I just want to throw up!!
Bono
The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
Oscar Wilde
HIGGINS. The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.
George Bernard Shaw
There was silence in her head and silence beneath her window, and still she could not sleep.
Sarah Rees Brennan
I have often wondered since at my own firmness. In that dreadful interview with my uncle I had felt, in the whirl and horror of my mind, on the very point of submitting, just as nervous people are said to throw themselves over precipices through sheer dread of falling.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Toadstool mandarins are a form of toxic jellyfish whose tentacles are loaded with entheogenic venom. The effects of a mandarin sting are threefold. The first is a sharp stinging sensation; the second a nasty red welt, which may fester if not treated with a salve of toadstool mandarin doodoo. And the third is a bold of self-awareness, thanks to the entheogens in the venom. Having been stung, a victim's typical reaction will be something like:Owww. Zark, that hurts.Then:Oh no. Look at this nasty red welt. I'm in the swimsuit competition later.And finally:What? I'm a latent misogynist with father issues!If a person is allergic to mandarin venom, one sting will prompt total self-awareness, leading to either immediate catatonia or a career as a talk show pundit.
Eoin Colfer
Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.
Oscar Wilde
Parentage is a very important profession but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interests of the Children.
George Bernard Shaw
It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
Oscar Wilde
Stop thinking of yourself as a victim. You were a target that is now no longer being hit.
Thomas Sheridan
Gloria screamed, but nothing came out. She could feel the scream in her throat, but it was clinging there, too scared to climb out of her mouth.Raymond might have screamed, too--he wasn't sure. His face was an exploding red ball--that was what it felt like. His heart was in the middle of his head. He couldn't see a thing.
Roddy Doyle
What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.
Oscar Wilde
Youth is wasted on the young.
George Bernard Shaw
If it is true that we cannot possess knowledge of what is good in any absolute sense, it is equally true that we have an ethical duty to decide between what is better and what is worse.
Richard Kearney
People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.
Colum McCann
Your mind is a treasure house that you should stock well and it’s the one part of you the world can’t interfere with.
Frank McCourt
Morality is not respectability.
George Bernard Shaw
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
A Torontonian is a man who leaves culture to his wife.
Brendan Behan
If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.
Oscar Wilde
One Life, with each other, Sisters, Brothers...
Bono
Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
Oscar Wilde
THE ACCURSED SHIP didn’t sink for a full three hours. By the time it did, I was feeling so traumatized that even watching Dogface die offered little consolation. The dialogue, the acting, the vast emptiness of the whole endeavor! Was that what passed for cinema these days? I felt like I had been violated; violated by a team of accountants. Laura, prostrated by grief, lay weeping on my lap. Frank stared stolidly at the credits, over which, as a coup de grâce, a cat or cats were being strangled to the effect that “My Heart Will Go On,” which at this moment in time was not a sentiment I could endorse.
Paul Murray
And if I am further pressed to declare straightforwardly whether I mean to disparage these authorities [who criticize Ibsen], I reply, pointedly, that I do. I affirm that such criticisms are written by men who know as much of political life as I know of navigation. (P. 56)
George Bernard Shaw
Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say a shocking, realization. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet.
John Banville
As yet we know nothing of what goes to create or evoke the active spark of life.
Bram Stoker
Please just admit it," said Valkyrie. "You're going to miss me, aren't you?" "Obviously," said Skulduggery. "Thank you." "like a drowning man misses the land." "Aw w w..." "Like a hesitant man misses the chance." "Yeah..." "Like an oblivious man misses the point." "I have a feeling you're mocking me somehow, but I can't put my finger on how.
Derek Landy
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
George Bernard Shaw
Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information.I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that?I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.
Oscar Wilde
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Seamus Heaney
You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about...anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all.
Oscar Wilde
Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.
Oscar Wilde
Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.
Samuel Beckett
Do you ever take a holiday? Like, do any of you just wake up and think ‘Today feels like a pyjama day.’? or is it always, ‘Today is a good day for murdering and stalking.’?
Catherine Doyle
I went out to the hazel woodbecause a fire was in my headcut and peeled a hazel wandand hooked a berry to a threadand when white moths were on the wingand moth-like stars were flickering outI dropped the berry in a stream,and caught a little silver trout....(Song of Wandering Aengus)
W.B. Yeats
What do you mean? In Old Castle? I still live with my parents in case you haven’t noticed, Jack. Those two strangers – that man and woman sitting on my sofa – are actually my parents. Oh, you mean your place? Yes, let’s evict your parents…let’s place them neatly in a cardboard box and leave it by the rubbish bins!
Jonathan Dunne
I watched her on the stand in that unfamiliar suit and thought of the soft hairs at the back of her neck, warm and smelling of the sun, and it seemed an impossible thing to me, it seemed the vastest and saddest miracle of my life: I touched her hair, once.
Tana French
Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.
Oscar Wilde
Well, I don't like the first bit and I don't know the last bit. So I'm really hoping the middle bit is exceptional.
Eoin Colfer
a single generation enamoured of foreign ways is almost enough in history to risk the whole continuity of civilization and learning.
Sister Nivedita
The Right Honourable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Estragon: They're too bigVladimir: Perhaps you'll have socks some day
Samuel Beckett
Every single time you crossed over for me and met me on my side. I realize now, I don't think I ever met you in the middle. And I don't think I ever once said that you for that.
Cecelia Ahern
I can write no stately proemAs a prelude to my lay;From a poet to a poemI would dare to say.For if of these fallen petalsOne to you seem fair,Love will waft it till it settlesOn your hair.And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand.
Oscar Wilde
Misery loved company, but damnation needed it.
John Connolly
He glanced at her, musing on the wonder of a beautiful woman with a disagreeable personality.
J.G. Farrell
What doesn't kill us makes us funnier.
Marian Keyes
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde
On the floor beside the spare pillow that had tumbled from the bed in her sleep was a single yellow flower. Five heart-shaped petals. As fresh and as pure as if it were in full bloom in a summer meadow.Drowsy and mind-fogged, she crept downstairs to look for a book on Irish wildflowers. It took her a while to find anything that resembled the yellow flower, but eventually she found an image and description that matched: "Cinquefoil, a flower renowned for its healing properties and a flower also said to be favored by fairy folk. Meanings associated with it include money, protection, sleep, prophetic dreams, and beloved daughter.
Hazel Gaynor
When you are young, feelings are your truth. Love is how you feel. The years have taught me that love is not an emotion that you feel about someone, but what you do for them.
Kate Kerrigan
Who, being loved, is poor?
Oscar Wilde
Let justice be done tho the heavens fall.
Michael Davitt
A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
George Moore
Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.
Oscar Wilde
Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid preasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor.
James Joyce
Soul appears when we make room for it.
Thomas Moore
Tea? At the beach? No time for luxuries, Holly. There is important work to be done.” He winked at Butler.“Are you sure you’re at the library? I thought I heard water.”Artemis smiled, enjoying the exchange. “Water? Surely not. The only thing flowing here is information.”“Are you grinning, Artemis? For some reason I get the feeling that you’re wearing that smug smile of yours.
Eoin Colfer
But I'm really enjoying my retirement. I get to sleep in every day. I do crossword puzzles and eat cake.
Derek Landy
Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?
Oscar Wilde
Don't you understand brother? I want to find a love...that will free me from this love...
Neil Jordan