Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 28

How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long—the care of cares—the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven—and straight you find a new stratum there. As physical science tells us no fluid is without its skin, so does it seem with this fine medium of the soul, and these successive films of care that form upon its surface on mere contact with the upper air and light.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.
Seán O'Casey
What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.
George Bernard Shaw
Martyrdom - the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
George Bernard Shaw
Men talk of killing time while time quietly kills them.
Dion Boucicault
Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?
Oscar Wilde
The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.
Oscar Wilde
There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.
Robert Lynd
Our Narcissistic Mother told us a Big Lie. She told it subliminally if not in actual words. And The Big Lie was this: If we tried hard enough we could win her approval and her love. If we were good enough, or wise enough, or beautiful enough, or that-magical-unspecified-ingredient enough. In other words, if we achieved perfection, she would love us.
Danu Morrigan
For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.
Oscar Wilde
And that is how Goodwin problems were always fixed. Fix them on the surface but don't go to the root, always ignoring the elephant in the room. I think that morning was when I realized I'd grown up with an elephant in every room of my life. It was practically our family pet.
Cecelia Ahern
... though he [Michael Faraday] took no cities, he captivated all hearts.
John Tyndall
The art of life is to live in the present moment and to make that moment as perfect as we can by the realization that we are the instruments and expression of God himself.
Emmet Fox
It’s not easy remembering the good times.
Cecelia Ahern
But you don’t really mean to say that you couldn’t love me if my name wasn’t Ernest?GWENDOLEN: But your name is Ernest.JACK: Yes, I know it is. But supposing it was something else? Do you mean to say you couldn’t love me
Oscar Wilde
Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.
George Bernard Shaw
One thing an early-on writer has to learn, is to be comfortable with and responsive to critique. When five people in a group tell you this chapter sucks; don’t snap back at them with, “Sure, but it gets better in another 6 or 7 chapters!”Listen. – Thank them. – Consider.They can look from a fresh perspective, and catch things that you might be too close to see.But, you will also learn along the way that not everyone in a group of relative amateurs themselves, is going to catch everything, and there will be a few who seem to never understand much of anything.Some will always want paragraphs chopped down to explosive missiles of passion, while others are more used to long composite paragraphs that I myself find impossible to wade through.You may, once you have hit your full stride and power, feel comfortable telling a few of them, “Look. This isn’t a diner. I don’t take orders: ‘I’m gluten intolerant; he can’t do salt; she’s allergic to peanuts ...’“If what I offer is a salad bar, then No; I am not going to fry you up a cheesesteak!
Edward Fahey
So what are you thinking?" I asked. I meant about the case, obviously, but Cassie was in a giddy mood--she generates more energy than most people, and she'd been sitting indoors most of the day. "Will you listen to him? A woman asking a guy what he's thinking is the ultimate crime, she's clingy and needy and he runs a mile, but when it's the other--" "Behave yourself," I said, pulling her hood over her face. "Help! I'm being oppressed!" she yelled through it. "Call the Equality Commission." The stroller girl gave us a sour look. "You're overexcited," I told Cassie. "Calm down or I'll take you home with no ice cream.
Tana French
Want to know who I am?Your responses indicate that you have a normal desire to share yourself with others. However, this need is not being adequately fulfilled at present.As a result, you unconsciously attempt to treat this emptiness with momentary interests and temporary passions. If left unaddressed, this imbalance leads to impulsive behavior and unnecessary risks.Past betrayals have left you generally suspicious of others’ behavior, particularly regarding romantic relationships. You fear you may be exploited if you open yourself too fully. Consequently, you often seek some proof of a new friend’s or lover’s sincerity before you decide to trust them.Further complicating your relationships is the anxiety you have about your unfulfilled personal and professional goals. You fear that you’ve made decisions that weren’t in your own best interest, or failed to take advantage of opportunities when they presented themselves.The desire to overcome these challenges sometimes lead you to seem pushy or even arrogant. Because this competitive urge is not always apparent to others, they are often surprised by it.However, the passion that underlies your desire for success is unique. This makes you unlike others. You cannot simply accept what life has to offer; you aspire for more.Between each inhale and exhale we die and are reborn.
Micheal Tsarion
Lord Henry smiled. "He gives you good advice, I suppose. People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.
Oscar Wilde
Time cannot be packaged and ribboned and left under trees for christmas morning.Time can't be given.But it can be shared
Cecelia Ahern
A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.
Oscar Wilde
If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.
Oscar Wilde
There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.
Diane Duane
Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.
Jonathan Swift
Hope, like the gleaming taper’s light, adorns and cheers our way; and still, as darker grows the night, emits a brighter ray.
Oliver Goldsmith
(on teaching writing) So many writers come to class with one question dominant in their mind, 'How do I make a living from this?' It's a fair enough question and one I always try to answer well - but it saddens me that it so often overshadows the more relevant questions of 'why am I writing' and 'what am I saying' and 'how do I keep it honest.
Celine Kiernan
Well, speaking as a feminist, I'm glad that women can lead--uh, groups of unspeakable magical evil.""Yes," Alan said gravely. "It'd be shoking if the evil magicians were sexist. For one thing, that would mean they were stupid, and having stupid enemies would be a terrible blow to my manly pride.
Sarah Rees Brennan
And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and wilful as a bird's heart?
James Joyce
Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.
Edmund Burke
Complaint is the largest tribute Heaven receives.
Jonathan Swift
It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.
Oscar Wilde
You know who you belong to, Jack?”“Yeah.”“Yourself.”He’s wrong, actually, I belong to Ma.
Emma Donoghue
You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play. I tell you Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.
Oscar Wilde
I have seen worse things than ghosts, and if one were to appear to me, I should have so many questions to ask of it that it would have no time to groan and moan and shake its chains.
Paul Kearney
We always find something, eh Didi, to let us think we exist?
Samuel Beckett
Bad artists always admire each others work.
Oscar Wilde
Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable
Oscar Wilde
When I travel, I get lovesick. Well, they call it chlamydia.
Jimmy Carr
I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.
Oscar Wilde
Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well.
James Joyce
But we had ceased to hate. Belsen had some way cured us of all hate, at least all hate of any human creature. We had learned what evil there is in the world or beyond the world, what happens to a man or a group of men-call them a nation if you will- when they have given themselves over to the powers of evil, when they have denied the Christ.
Robert Collis
I loved this place when I was a kid. I still love it, but when I was a kid I'd take the bus down here and spend all day long reading in this room.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Also, vampires don't eat food. You never get to eat chocolate again. Ever. I'd rather die.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Irony is wasted on the stupid
Oscar Wilde
The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
Jonathan Swift
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
Jonathan Swift
All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.
Colum McCann
Well,” her mother said, looking at the engine, “at least that’s still there.”"Do you know anything about engines?" Stephanie asked."That’s why I have a husband, so I don't have to. Engines and shelves, that’s why men were invented."Stephanie made a mental note to learn about engines before she turned eighteen. She wasn't too fussed about the shelves.
Derek Landy
The writers against religion whilst they oppose every system are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.
Edmund Burke
How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?
Oscar Wilde
Within this restless, hurried, modern worldWe took our hearts' full pleasure - You and I,And now the white sails of our ship are furled,And spent the lading of our argosy.Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,For very weeping is my gladness fled,Sorrow has paled my young mouth's vermilion,And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.But all this crowded life has been to theeNo more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spellOf viols, or the music of the seaThat sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.
Oscar Wilde
The words of the bards come down the centuries to us, warm with living breath.
Pádraic Pearse
If cats could count, they’d start getting nervous around the time they put paid to their fifth life.
John Connolly
I don't know why men like to barbecue so much. Maybe its the only thing they can cook. Or maybe they're just closet pyromaniacs.
Cecelia Ahern
His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.
James Joyce
There's my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don't say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.
Samuel Beckett
For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints.
James Joyce
I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.
Oliver Goldsmith
It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can.
Sebastian Barry