Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 35

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates it's own objects: is this not also true of fear?
Elizabeth Bowen
The Noblest form of Affection
Oscar Wilde
...as you know, I don't believe in fear, just an invention by men so they get all the money and good jobs...
Marian Keyes
Hell is full of musical amateurs.
George Bernard Shaw
I am Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle. Keep a civil tongue in your head or lose it
Sarah Rees Brennan
Maybe niceness is the wrong metric, I said. Of course it's really about power, Bobbi agreed. But it's harder to work out who has the power, so instead we rely on 'niceness' as a kind of stand-in. I mean this is an issue in public discourse. We end up asking like, is Israel 'nicer' than Palestine.
Sally Rooney
the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failure. a
Oscar Wilde
For his mourners will be outcast menAnd outcasts always mourn...
Oscar Wilde
...for Taggart, learning the reality of abortion for the first time was shocking. “Even if it’s done right, it’s barbaric,” he told us. “I’m no holy roller, but if you see the way they actually have to do it, it’s barbaric.” The learning experience was one shared by Wechsler, Pescatore, Wood, and the rest of the team.
Ann McElhinney
What's this?" he inquired, none too pleasantly. "A circus?""No, Julius. It's the end of the circus.""I see. And these are the clowns?"Foaly's head poked through the doorway."Pardon me for interrupting your extended circus metaphor, but what the hell is that?
Eoin Colfer
I will admit that I wanted to shout for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head. It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal cellar.And after all, what nobler elevation could you find in this world than the scaffold of a wall painter? No admiral on the bridge of a new battleship designed by the old navy, could feel more pleased with himself than Gulley, on two planks, forty feet above dirt level, with his palette table beside him, his brush in his hand, and the draught blowing up his trousers; cleared for action.
Joyce Cary
Everyone knows a wife and kids tie you down. What people miss sometimes is that mates, the proper kind, they do the same just as hard. Mates mean you've settled, made your bargain: this, wherever you are together, this is as far as you're going, ever. This is your stop; this is where you get off.
Tana French
The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.
Oscar Wilde
Because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good.
Oscar Wilde
Music, oh, how faint, how weak,Language fades before thy spell!Why should Feeling ever speak,When thou canst breathe her soul so well?
Thomas Moore
The simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and to soften mankind, than all the (investigations) disquisitions of philosophers and than all the exhortations of moralists.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
You are a cynical man, Mr. Pleasant.""We live in cynical times, Miss Cain.
Derek Landy
Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.
Oscar Wilde
Republicans know well that a change of rhetorical pace is necessary. But efforts by their leaders to damp down the bellicosity of newly elected Tea Party types is running into the fact that the Tea Partiers have only the high volume setting on their amplifiers, just like Palin. They're like a couple having a fight at a funeral; politely sotto voce, then suddenly bursting out fortissimo with their plaints and accusations.
Alexander Cockburn
Then she gave one last burst of music. The white Moon heard it, and she forgot the dawn, and lingered on in the sky. The red rose heard it, and it trembled all over with ecstasy, and opened its petals to the cold morning air. Echo bore it to her purple cavern in the hills, and woke the sleeping shepherds from their dreams. It floated through the reeds of the river, and they carried its message to the sea.
Oscar Wilde
You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard but by attacking and getting well-hammered yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Skulduggery stood among the ruins of what had once been a sofa. Valkyrie raised an ey
Derek Landy
You are responsible for your own life and what happens in it, so are the other people.
Cecelia Ahern
I think locality exercises strange influence over some minds. The peaceful meadow-scenery holds no lurking horrors in its bosom, but in the lonesome moorlands, full of curiously molded boulders, grotesque fancies must assail one there. Creatures seem to come, odd and ill-defined as their surroundings. As a child I had a peculiar horror of those tall, odd-shaped boulders, with seeming faces, featureless, it is true, but sometimes strangely resembling humans and animals. I believe the spinney may be haunted by something of this nature, terrible as the trees. ("The Haunted Spinney")
Elliott O'Donnell
It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wife iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.
Trish Deseine
Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.
James Joyce
Bronagh when she entered the room. She placed her hands on her hips and sighed, deeply. “I’m so fat.” She frowned. “It 58/668took me a whole sixty seconds to get meself off the toilet.”I snickered while Dominic tilted his head to the side.“Fat?” he questioned. “And here Ithought you were pregnant. Man, you had me fooled.”Bronagh gave him the finger. “Bite me, Fuckface. You did this to me.
L.A. Casey
You are the greatest achievement of your own life.
Sarah Rees Brennan
I knew immediately something was terribly wrong, but you can know that and not allow the thought in your head, at the front of your head. It dances around at the back, where it can't be controlled. But the front of the head is where the pain begins.
Sebastian Barry
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
The most dangerous drink is gin. You have to be really, really careful with that. And you also have to be 45, female and sitting on the stairs. Because gin isn't really a drink, it's more a mascara thinner. "Nobody likes my shoes!" "I made... I made fifty... fucking vol-au-vents, and not one of you... not one of you... said 'Thank you.'" And my favourite: "Everybody, shut up. Shut up! This song is all about me.
Dylan Moran
But I cant stand saying one thing when everyone knows I mean another. Whats the use in such hypocrisy? If people arrange the world that way for women, theres no good pretending it’s arranged the other way...
George Bernard Shaw
I should have learned mindfulness, and it’s too late now because it’s no good learning it when you’re already in crisis: you have to start when things are good. But only the very, very oddest would think, Hey, my life is perfect. I know! I’ll sit and waste twenty minutes Observing My Thoughts without Judgement.
Marian Keyes
I don't like compliments and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.
Oscar Wilde
Disappointments in love, even betrayals and losses, serve the soul at the very moment they seem in life to be tragedies. The soul is partly in time and partly in eternity. We might remember the part that resides in eternity when we feel despair over the part that is in life.
Thomas Moore
It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.
Edmund Burke
Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.
Frank McCourt
Men never feel quite the same about a woman's body once they know it's done that thing: widened and torn to push out a baby's head.
Emma Donoghue
I've always been a monster,' Scapegrace told her, 'but now, finally, my physical for reflects my inner darkness.''You smell terrible.''That's the smell of evil.''It's like rancid meat and bad eggs.''Evil," Scapegrace insisted.
Derek Landy
There is no failure here sweetheart, just when you quit.
U2
Oh," she said, in a very different way. "Well. Thanks for my part in the compliment. Naturally I'd love to be watched and controlled, but I think I may be washing my hair that day.
Sarah Rees Brennan
In all my wanderings through this world of care,In all my griefs -- and God has given my share --I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown,Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down;To husband out life's taper at the close,And keep the flame from wasting, by repose:I still had hopes, for pride attends us still,Amidst the swains to show my book-learn'd skill,Around my fire an evening group to draw,And tell of all I felt, and all I saw;And, as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,Pants to the place from whence at first she flew,I still had hopes, my long vexations past,Here to return -- and die at home at last.
Oliver Goldsmith
I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.
George Bernard Shaw
Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable.
Oscar Wilde
I’d practically groped her under the guise of helping her get out a stain, but still, she looked like she found me about as appealing as second-hand underpants.
L.H. Cosway
Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first.‘If you follow them’, said the Sergeant, ‘you will save your soul and never get a fall on a slippery road.
Flann O'Brien
The wave of pure outrage blindsided me. I shouldn't be here, I thought. This is utterly fucked up. I should have been sitting in a garden down the road, barefoot with a drink in my hand, swapping the day's work stories with Peter and Jamie. I had never thought about this before, and it almost knocked me over: all the things we should have had. We should have stayed up all night together studying and stressing out before exams, Peter and I should have argued over who got to bring Jamie to our first dance and slagged her about how she looked in her dress. We should have come weaving home together, singing and laughing and inconsiderate, after drunken college nights. We could have shared a flat, taken off Interrailing around Europe, gone arm-in-arm through dodgy fashion phases and low-rent gigs and high-drama love affairs. Two of us might have been married by now, given the other one a godchild. I had been robbed blind.
Tana French
Sometimes things happen that give me cause to believe I no longer exist. Car park barriers which do not lift when I drive towards them, automatic doors which do not open automatically as I approach.
Sara Baume
When sin ceases to pay, we have a happy knack of finding out that it is wrong; so after a bit, when Virginia, and Georgia and the Carolinas had ceased to belong to us, we began to denounce this trade in African flesh, and to denounce it in no stinted terms.
W. F. Butler
If you want to thrive, you need to sow the seeds of self-development.
Brian Buffini
Religion to me almost like when God leaves – and people devise a set of rules to fill in the space.
Bono
Magic is really only the utilization of the entire spectrum of the senses. Humans have cut themselves off from their senses. Now they see only a tiny portion of the visible spectrum, hear only the loudest of sounds, their sense of smell is shockingly poor and they can only distinguish the sweetest and sourest of tastes.
Michael Scott
If you lose someone, you feel a loss, then after a while you fill in the hole in your life and the loss gradually gets smaller and smaller and eventually goes away. There's a point to the pain. There's a reason and a direction.
Marian Keyes
When honor dies—when trust is a useless thing—what use is life?
Diane Duane
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
Oscar Wilde
I am married to Beatrice Salkeld a painter. We have no children except me.
Brendan Behan
Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.
Elizabeth Bowen
Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.
Oscar Wilde
What am I going to do without you, Oscar?’‘You’ll be fine’, I answered. ‘You could probably do some time away from me. I’m a pain in the neck. You’re always saying so.’‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’ll be great to have you out of my hair for a few months.’‘Oscar, seriously though.’‘What?’‘Stay in touch, will you? Please?’‘Of course I will.’‘Promise?’‘Yes, I promise.’‘Good, because I’m really going to miss you.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
William Butler Yeats