Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 29

The closest I’d ever got to seeing a naked woman before was black and white cleavage, and then Rosie tossed her clothes in a corner just like they were getting in the way and spun around in the dim light of Number 16, palms up, luminous, laughing, almost close enough to touch. The thought still knocks the wind out of me. I was too young even to know what I wanted to do about her, I just knew nothing in the World, not the Mona Lisa walking through the Grand Canyon with the Holy Grail in one hand and a winning lotto ticket in the other, was ever going to be that beautiful.
Tana French
Many [Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers] DONMs have a deeply buried sense that we are inherently flawed. That there is something twisted and evil and nasty and noxious and poisonous about us, and that we were born that way. It‟s part of who we are rather than just something we do. This brings with it a huge all-encompassing sense of shame.
Danu Morrigan
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
Jonathan Swift
Discontent is the first step in progress. No one knows what is in him till he tries and many would never try if they were not forced to.
Basil W. Maturin
Long are the lives of elves' he said.Short are the tempers of dwarfs,'Gotrek muttered, just loud enough to be heard.
William King
Me," Artemis blurted. "I'm the nut."Artemis could have sworn the squid winked at him before bringing the five-ton chunk of spacecraft swinging down toward the morsel of meat in its blue shell."I'm the nut!" Artemis shouted again, a little hysterically, it must be said.
Eoin Colfer
If you go to heaven without being naturally qualified for it you will not enjoy it there.
George Bernard Shaw
I always love to begin a journey on Sundays because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land or by water.
Jonathan Swift
Skul-man!' he exclaimed as he rushed forward to shake his hand. 'Last I heard you were trapped on a dead world overrun by evil trans-dimensional superfiends!' Skulduggery nodded. 'Just got back.
Derek Landy
The blood is the life!
Bram Stoker
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
William Butler Yeats
The unknown is sexier that the revealed. All magic tricks are a disappointment once you learn how they’re done.
L.H. Cosway
Excuse me, Tex," the nurse said, hands on hips. 'Would you mind reining in the voice. There are babies being born in this hospital. We wouldn't want the first sound they hear to be your painful howling. There could be lawsuits.
Eoin Colfer
I suppose it is that sickness and weakness are selfish things and turn our inner eyes and sympathy on ourselves, whilst health and strength give love rein, and in thought and feeling he can wander where he wills.
Bram Stoker
I felt the protective dam I'd built around my heart began to crumble. I turned my eyes back to him and felt the love finally start to trickle out through the fissures. And hoped that one day it would become a torrent.
Lucinda Riley
People will come to test and divide us, but, as long as we keep compassion in our hearts for others, they won't win.
Stewart Stafford
Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves?
Oscar Wilde
It's like learning to ride a unicorn. You never forget.
Eoin Colfer
Something deep in human make up needs and longs for a taste of eternity--a momentary release from the relentless pace of time.
Thomas Moore
The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
Oscar Wilde
...the more I felt that perhaps believing in fairies was more important than seeing them. In seeing, there is often question and doubt.
Hazel Gaynor
Valkyrie made a face. "Bloody vampires."Ryan sat forward. "That was a vampire? That guy who looked like an accountant?""We don't talk about vampires," Skulduggery warned."But it was daytime. How could he have been out during the-""We don't talk about vampires!" Valkyrie said sharply.Ryan shrunk back. "Sorry," he said."Don't worry about it," Skulduggery told him. "Valkyrie used to date a vampire that's
Derek Landy
It was as if they wanted to take their older bodies and put their younger hearts inside.
Colum McCann
Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.
Adrian McKinty
The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.
George Bernard Shaw
Life wasn't too bad. The trouble with Man was, even while he was having a good time, he didn't appreciate it. Why, thought Milligan, this very moment might be the happiest in me life. The very thought of it made him miserable.
Spike Milligan
Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
William Butler Yeats
The moment will arrive when you are comfortable with who you are, and what you are– bald or old or fat or poor, successful or struggling- when you don't feel the need to apologize for anything or to deny anything. To be comfortable in your own skin is the beginning of strength.
Charles B. Handy
I am dwelling on things I love, even if a measure of tragedy is stitched into everything, if you follow the thread long enough
Sebastian Barry
Do ghosts drink tea?They don't, said Tansey. But this ghost would love to see a cup of tea in front of her. It'd be lovely.
Roddy Doyle
There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.
James Joyce
Men know life too early women know life too late.
Oscar Wilde
In selfish men caution is as secure an armour for their foes as for themselves.
Bram Stoker
What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet." (A Teller of Tales)
W.B. Yeats
But with your life you make a few bad decisions, get unlucky a few times, whatever, but you have to keep going, right?
Cecelia Ahern
People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.
William Trevor
O God if in the day of battle I forget Thee do not Thou forget me.
William King
Now I wonder if each artwork is in fact utterly inaccessible to everybody but the person to whom it is secretly addressed?
Sara Baume
Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.
Tana French
Always! That is the dreadful word ... it is a meaningless word too.
Oscar Wilde
Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather an other chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
Oscar Wilde
There is a faculty in man that will acknowledge the unseen. He may scout and scare religion from him; but if he does, superstition perches near.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Goodbye, Room." I wave up at Skylight. "Say goodbye," I tell Ma. "Goodbye, Room."Ma says it but on mute.I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the door.
Emma Donoghue
There's a clock on the wall. Press your hand against the face and turn it very slightly to the. Left. There'll be a click to tell you it's done.""Sounds easy enough.""Yes it does," said Sanguine. "Kiss for good luck?""Maybe later," said Gracious."How about a handshake?" Asked Donegan.
Derek Landy
A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.
Tana French
Custom reconciles us to everything.
Edmund Burke
To most of us the real life is the life we do not lead.
Oscar Wilde
The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain.
Adrian McKinty
Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?
Bernard Shaw George
I've fallen in love with you," he whispered to kiss the top of my hand.
Anna Carey
There was a magic about the sea. People were drawn to it. People wanted to love by it, swim in it, play in it, look at it. It was a living thing that as as unpredictable as a great stage actor: it could be calm and welcoming, opening its arms to embrace it's audience one moment, but then could explode with its stormy tempers, flinging people around, wanting them out, attacking coastlines, breaking down islands. It had a playful side too, as it enjoyed the crowd, tossed the children about, knocked lilos over, tipped over windsurfers, occasionally gave sailors helping hands; all done with a secret little chuckle
Cecelia Ahern
Round these men stories tended to group themselves, sometimes deserting more ancient heroes for the purpose. Round poets have they gathered especially, for poetry in Ireland has always been mysteriously connected with magic.
W.B. Yeats
Who do you think's after you, Shane, my lad? Or is it just the dark you're afeared of?
Adrian McKinty
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Oscar Wilde
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Oliver Goldsmith
All we’re trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.
Eamon Grennan
This book tells my story. I’m writing it in Ireland, in a house on a hillside. The house sits low in the landscape between a holy well and the site of an Iron Age dwelling. It was built of stones ploughed out of the fields by men who knew how to raise them with their hands and to lock one stone to the next so each was firm. It’s a lone house on the foothills of the last mountain on the Dingle peninsula, the westernmost point in mainland Europe. At night the sky curves above it like a dark bowl, studded with stars.…From the moment I crossed the mountain, I fell in love with the place, which was more beautiful than any I’d ever seen. And with a way of looking at life that was deeper, richer, and wiser than any I’d known before.
Felicity Hayes-McCoy
He's a waiter, not a Mafia stooge, so what's he going to do? Blac pepper them to death? Compliment them into a coma? Run them over with the dessert trolley?
Marian Keyes
Lady Bracknell, I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?
Oscar Wilde
Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.
Colum McCann