Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 37

Being a detective isn't all about torture and murder and monsters. Sometimes it gets truly unpleasant...The fate of the world may depend on whether or not you can bring yourself to visit your relatives.
Derek Landy
(...) and I tell you, Austin Ruthyn, if you won't look about and marry somebody, somebody may possibly marry you.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Up the airy mountain,Down the rushy glen,We daren't go a-huntingFor fear of little men.
William Allingham
I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.
Oscar Wilde
(I) only write it now because I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English. ("The Adoration of The Magi")
W.B. Yeats
And if I was bewildered through those decades, totally bewildered, so was the country I came from. The majority, what was the phrase? 'Condemn utterly what is happening, this barbarity.' But that's all we did. Condemn. And march. But not often enough.
Josephine Hart
The crime which is done now is that war has made a tool and slave of science, and man's knowledge, painfully and laboriously compiled, is made the instrument of man's destruction.
Leonard Wibberley
Is that it?”“No. That’s a wall.”“It could be disguised.”“You’re not very good at looking for things, are you?”“I’m good at looking for walls. Look, I found another one.
Derek Landy
There is reason that all things are as they are, and did you see with my eyes and know with my knowledge, you would perhaps better understand.
Bram Stoker
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Oscar Wilde
No matter how hard Evil tries, it can never quite match up to the power of Good, because Evil is ultimately self-destructive. Evil may set out to corrupt others, but in the process corrupts itself. That's just the way Evil is. All things considered, it's better to be on the side of Good, even if Evil occasionally has nicer uniforms.
John Connolly
When You Are Old"WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
W.B. Yeats
Are you an angel or a devil, sir? I need to know. Are you taking me up or down?
Eoin Colfer
For the first time in years, she felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that she was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.
Colm Tóibín
You can never plan the future by the past.
Edmund Burke
Getting an interview with someone is like asking your good-looking cousin to go out with a friend of a friend on a blind date: you must approach the subject Just So.
John Brady
It is not the prisoners who need reformation it is the prisons.
Oscar Wilde
So why not live with the magic? Be a kid again and believe in the fantastical. Life is more fun with a little smoke and mirrors.
L.H. Cosway
How can I ever make you understand Cassie and me? I would have to take you there, walk you down every path of our secret shared geography. The truism says it’s against all odds for a straight man and woman to be real friends, platonic friends; we rolled thirteen, threw down five aces and ran away giggling. She was the summertime cousin out of storybooks, the one you taught to swim at some midge-humming lake and pestered with tadpoles down her swimsuit, with whom you practiced first kisses on a heather hillside and laughed about it years later over a clandestine joint in your granny’s cluttered attic. She painted my fingernails gold and dared me to leave them that way for work…We climbed out her window and down the fire escape and lay on the roof of the extension below, drinking improvised cocktails and singing Tom Waits and watching the stars spin dizzily around us.No.
Tana French
Truth is, something that I thought was perfect was taken away from me, and I never wanted perfect again. I wanted middle of the road, stuff I didn’t care about so that I couldn’t lose anything I really loved ever again.
Cecelia Ahern
I don't lie to you," Alan said. "I lie WITH you."Sin stopped looking up at him from under her eyelashes and burst out laughing.Alan went red. "So I've just realized how that come out. Uh.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's part of any endeavour, not just writing.
Roddy Doyle
She hesitated, wiping her hands off on her apron. “I’m not sure if I’ll be here when you get back. This place is a little—it’s a little much for me.”She didn’t have to tell him how it was. He had lived here for years, in a house that wanted to be silent until the silence was broken by a certain step and a certain voice, in a house holding its breath for someone’s return. If anyone held their breath long enough, they were dead.
Sarah Rees Brennan
It's not so bad."Melancholia looked at her. "You're lying.""I'll get used to it. So will you.""I... I don't think I'll be able to.""I'll be there to help when you need it.""But I hate you."Valkyrie smiled. "No you don't.""No, I do. I want to kill you and stuff.""We actually became friends in those caves.""That's not what happened, " said Melancholia."We're pals. We're buddies.” "If my wrists weren't in shackles, my hands would be round your throat.""You want to hug my throat because we're friends.
Derek Landy
something was dead in each of us,and what was dead was hope.
Oscar Wilde
My mother says: 'People who suffer from anxiety are usually those with the most vivid imaginations.
Sara Baume
How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.""Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.""I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.
Oscar Wilde
What dreams would he have, not seeing. Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born that way?
James Joyce
There is hope for all of us. Well anyway if you don't die you live through it day in day out.
Mary Beckett
I wanted to do this properly, but I look at you and I forget...
Abby Green
Being single doesn't mean you're weak, it means that you're strong enough to wait for the right person.
Niall Horan
I can't stand light. I hate weather. My idea of heaven is moving from one smoke-filled room to another.
Peter O'Toole
Why do you want to do this?" he asked curiously. "Why is this woman so important to you?"Saint-Germain blinked in surprise. "Have you ever loved anyone?" he asked."Yes," Tamnuz said cautiously, "I had a consort once, Inanna...""But did you love her? Truly love her?"The Green Man remained silent."Did she mean more to you than life itself?" Saint-Germain persisted."They do not love that do not show their love," Shakespeare murmured very softly.The French immortal stepped closer to the Elder. "I love my Jeanne," he said simply. "I must go to her.""Even though it will cost you everything?" Tamnuz persisted, as if the idea was incomprehensible."Yes. Without Joan, everything I have is worthless.""Even your immortality?""Especially my immortality." Gone were the banter and the jokes. This was a Saint-Germain whom neither Shakespeare nor Palamedes had ever seen before. "I love her," he said,
Michael Scott
Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.
James Joyce
I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
I never saw "being different" in and of itself as the point to "being Goth" -- dressing different from most others, maybe, but the point to me was to get together with people who liked the same music and clothes, or at least very similar music and clothes, and go to clubs, go to movies, go to coffee-houses and hold poetry readings and, in general, just have some good harmless fun. Did I look like a dork? Sure, but so did everybody else in the club. We weren't "being different", at least not all of us, we just were different and the point was to stop bitching about being different and just have fun.
Ruadhán J. McElroy
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.
Oscar Wilde
When people fuck with you, you gotta choice. You can fuck back or swallow down. Swallow down enough times and you start to choke. Or you can learn to accept. Let go. Breathe easy.
Kit de Waal
A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.
George Bernard Shaw
He'd never known he had so much fight in him. Never known he could be capable of so much... He was going to change the world.
Ethel Rohan
Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.
Oscar Wilde
It's too warm for red wine; now I mix gin and tonics instead. I find they make the ordinary sensation of living lighter, less ruffled.
Sara Baume
Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.
Iris Murdoch
I made the valuable discovery that practicing wasn't a matter of time at all. It was a matter of intensity. Five minutes spent working consciously and hard at the elimination of an error, was worth five hours just playing away ignoring errors as if they hadn't happened.
Leonard Wibberley
It does not matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you do not do it in the street and frighten the horses.
Patrick Campbell
I think the very best attitude for anyone investing in the stock market is to make up his mind to lose money.”— The Duchess Gloriana XII
Leonard Wibberley
Originality is the most deadly mirage in all of art. You can chase it from now until doomsday, and you'll only find yourself lost and dying of thirst.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume—and no farther than to my first day's life—'tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it—on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back—
Laurence Sterne
Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.
Frank McCourt
Step by stepMoment by momentWe live throughAnother day
Anne McCaffrey
These three children own the summer. They know the wood as surely as they know the micro landscapes of their own grazed knees; put them down blindfolded in any dell or clearing and they could find their way out without putting a foot wrong. This is their territory, and they rule it wild and lordly as young animals; they scramble through its trees and hide-and-seek in its hollows all the endless day long, and all night in their dreams.
Tana French
The reason I like the game chess is because each move has countless repercussions, but you're in charge of them. And it's your ability to see into the future and the effects of the decisions you've made that males you either a good or not a good chess player. It's not luck.
Bono
I don't have deal breakers," Alan said. "I look on tempests, and am never shaken.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Personally, I'd prefer a guy who wants to see my boobs.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Willpower is misunderstood. The very word suggests that wanting something badly enough bequeaths that necessary strength to achieve or overcome something. If that were the case, I'd be Michael Fassbender's missus by now.
Annmarie O'Connor
You don't learn to hold your own by standing on guard but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Artemis felt like he was six again and caught hacking the school computers trying to make the test questions harder
Eoin Colfer
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
George Bernard Shaw
Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
Oscar Wilde
It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.
George Bernard Shaw