Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 27

She remained silent. There was nothing left to say. He'd said it all the night before. He had to end it. He could never leave his wife. And, in fact, she had known this. Although she loved him - and truly she did - he wasn't hers. He belonged to his wife. She'd earned him. It didn't matter that he was her first love or that she was his passion. It didn't matter that they had loved one another for more than half their lives. It didn't matter that he had married his wife on the rebound. It didn't matter that he didn't love the woman. It didn't even matter that they had turned into some soap-opera cliche. He was married to someone else and that meant that she was leftovers and destined to remain on the periphery in the shadow of another woman's marriage. But no more. She was well and truly sick of it. 
Anna McPartlin
And she said that sometimes you wish for something very hard, it can kind of come true inside your own head, and it can seem real.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
Oscar Wilde
Waiting to be 'better' is the wrong approach. It's learning to live with it.
Marian Keyes
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium
Oscar Wilde
Plans are invitation to disappointment.
Derek Landy
The human situation, in general or in particular, is slightly worse (ignoring an occasional hiccup in the graph) at any given moment than at any preceding moment.
FARRELL J.G.
CHARTERIS [unfolding his arms in terror] No, please. Dont. As a philosopher, it’s my business to tell other people the truth; but it’s not their business to tell it to me. I dont like it: it hurts.
George Bernard Shaw
Grand Mage,” Ghastly said, as he put the map away, “did you know the sparrow flies south for the winter?”“What an odd thing to say,” Ravel said, and as he turned, he snapped his palm against the air and Paloma slammed into the wall.”…..“What do you know,” Ravel said, breathing a little faster, “Skulduggery’s silly little code actually works.”“Grand Mage,” Ghastly said, as he put the map away, “did you know the sparrow flies south for the winter?”“What an odd thing to say,” Ravel said, and as he turned, he snapped his palm against the air and Paloma slammed into the wall.”…..“What do you know,” Ravel said, breathing a little faster, “Skulduggery’s silly little code actually works.
Derek Landy
You can’t avoid the inevitability of death. It comes at you one way or another, and takes us all to the same place in the end. To apologize for it is to apologize for the sun shining or the rain falling. It is what it is.
Catherine Doyle
What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.
Iris Murdoch
I am not afraid of the pen or the scaffold or the sword. I will tell the truth whenever I please.
Mother Jones
how does she know it's the right room?' wondered Descant.Oh, I don't know; mabye it's the magical red glow coming from the doorway, or perhaps it's the deafening howl of the temporal winds.' said Mervall. Descant nodded.'You could be right, brother. And don't think I don't know sarcasm when I hear it.
Eoin Colfer
A woman seldom writes her Mind but in her Postscript.
Richard Steele
How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.
Bram Stoker
I'll fares the land to hastening ills of prey Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
Oliver Goldsmith
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
George Bernard Shaw
Leave him alone!" Debbie shouted."Shut up, please, or I'll kill you," Mr Tiny replied.
Darren Shan
Why, isabel? Why are you doing this to yourself? To your
Louise O'Neill
At the door, there was one of those moment when two people realize that they like each other more than they know each other. This is nicer than the opposite situation, but more awkward. You try to remember the protocol for touching. You hate to gush, or presume to much, yet you are unwilling to let the moment pass without without some gesture
Emma Donoghue
He hasn't an enemy in the world and none of his friends like him.
Oscar Wilde
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
Oscar Wilde
I decided I would teach Mrs. P. a lesson by cooking my own meal.
Paul Murray
I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.
Laurence Sterne
[Artemis] returned to the aft bay for Mulch's version of a briefing. The dwarf had drawn a crude diagram on a backlit wall panel. In fairness, there were more artistic chimpanzees. And less pungent ones. Mulch was using a carrot as a pointer, or more accurately, several carrots. Dwarfs liked carrots. 'This is Koboi Labs,' He mumbled around a mouthful of vegetable. 'That?' exclaimed Root. 'I realize, Julius, that it is not an accurate schematic.'The Commander exploded from his chair. 'An accurate schematic? It's a rectangle for heaven's sake!'Mulch was unperturbed. 'That's not important. This is the important bit.' 'That wobbly line?' 'It's a fissure,' pouted the dwarf. 'Anybody can see that.''Anybody in kindergarten maybe. So it's a fissure, so what?''This is the clever bit. Y'see that fissure is not usually there.'Root began strangling the air again. Something he was doing more and more lately.
Eoin Colfer
Westward the course of empire takes its way.
Bishop Berkeley
Some people live a nothing life: the most important thing they ever do is die. Thank God for eccentrics! Take Gunner Octavian Neat. He would suddenly appear naked in a barrack room and say, “Does anybody know a good tailor?”, or “Gentlemen – I think there’s a thief in the battery.” He was the bane of the Regiment.
Spike Milligan
Oscar had a straightforward, dimpled, happy smile. It was one of the hundreds of great things about him.And after that we were best friends. It had been as simple and inevitable as the striking of a match.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
We had gone out there to pass the beautiful day of high summer like true Irishmen - locked in the dark Snug of a public house.
Brendan Behan
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
James Joyce
The pop culture cliché of the American High School movie, which adapted old archetypes, depicted a social world in which the worst sexists were always the all brawn no brains sports jock. But now that the online world has given us a glimpse into the inner lives of others, one of the surprising revelations is that it is the nerdish self-identifying nice guy who could never get the girl who has been exposed as the much more hate-filled, racist, misogynist who is insanely jealous of the happiness of others.
Angela Nagle
Habit is a great deadener.
Samuel Beckett
It is in games that many men discover their paradise.
Robert Lynd
The very pink of perfection.
Oliver Goldsmith
Although I felt very weak, I did not feel ill; and strength, one always fancies, is a thing that may be picked up when we please.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things
Oscar Wilde
The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that's the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you'll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone's constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it's - if you'll forgive my language - it's bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that's how they like it. They don't transform, they don't stop to smell the roses, they don't sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood - Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren't waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They're not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel - that's finished.
Paul Murray
Fletcher was always going to be your ex-boyfriend, from the moment you met him. He's just finally caught up with where he's supposed to be.
Derek Landy
Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven.
George Bernard Shaw
I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.
Oscar Wilde
I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.
W.B. Yeats
Aurora sagged. "Why is it," she asked, "that every time I'm with you two we end up stealing something big?""We always return it," Donegan said, a little defensively. "Maybe not always in one piece or necessarily to the right person but return it we do, and so it is not stealing, it is merely borrowing."Gracious looked at him. "It's a little bit stea
Derek Landy
Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.
George Bernard Shaw
No wise man ever wished to be younger.
Jonathan Swift
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as if it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.
Oscar Wilde
And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another.
Samuel Beckett
Nor did he think of Celia any more, though he could sometimes remember having dreamt of her. If only he had been able to think of her, he would not have needed to dream of her.
Samuel Beckett
Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on... The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.
Oscar Wilde
Dear little Swallow,’ said the Prince, ‘you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery.
Oscar Wilde
We must stand together if we don't there will be no victory for any one of us.
Mother Jones
Light heat all known all white heart breath no sound.
Samuel Beckett
The play was a great success but the audience was a disaster.
Oscar Wilde
I was sweating like Christy Moore at a Feis Ceol, so badly, in fact, I looked like I was sporting a finger moustache as I attempted to rescue suicidal perspiration drops from my upper lip. Classy.
Annmarie O'Connor
The way we are living,timorous or bold,will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
Bloom of adulthood. Try a whiff of that. On your back in the dark you remember. Ah you remember. Cloudless May day. She joins you in the little summerhouse. Entirely of logs. Both larch and fir. Six feet across. Eight from floor to vertex. Area twenty-four square feet to the furthest decimal. Two small multicoloured lights vis-a-vis. Small stained diamond panes. Under each a ledge. There on summer Sundays after his midday meal your father loved to retreat with Punch and a cushion. The waist of his trousers unbuttoned he sat on the one ledge and turned the pages. You on the other your feet dangling. When he chuckled you tried to chuckle too. When his chuckle died yours too. That you should try to imitate his chuckle pleased and amused him greatly and sometimes he would chuckle for no other reason than to hear you try to chuckle too. Sometimes you turn your head and look out through a rose-red pane. You press your little nose against the pane and all without is rosy. The years have flown and there at the same place as then you sit in the bloom of adulthood bathed in rainbow light gazing before you. She is late.
Samuel Beckett
Ah earth you old extinguisher.
Samuel Beckett
Sometimes I wish I could feel more painso I could touch that much more beauty.
Edward Fahey
In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
Oscar Wilde
Keyholes are the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this world put together.
Laurence Sterne