Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 38

While the light remains,' said Carde, speaking slowly in his high deliberate voice, 'only do not forsake the joy of life. If you shall have given all your kisses, you will give too few. And as leaves fall from withered wreaths which you may see spread upon the cups and floating there, so for us, who now as lovers hope for so much, perhaps tomorrow's day will close the doom.
Iris Murdoch
I need a weapon,” Valkyrie muttered.“You’re an Elemental with a Necromancer ring, trained ina variety of martial arts by some of the best fighters in the world,” Skulduggery pointed out. “I’m fairly certain that makes you a weapon.”“I mean a weapon you hold. You have a gun, Tanith has a sword... I want a stick.”“I’ll buy you a stick for Christmas.
Derek Landy
When you drop a glass or a plate to the ground it makes a loud crashing sound. When a window shatters a table leg breaks or when a picture falls off the wall it makes a noise. But as for your heart when that breaks it s completely silent. You would think as it s so important it would make the loudest noise in the whole world or even have some ... Read Moresort of ceremonious sound like the gong of a cymbal or the ringing of a bell. But it s silent and you almost wish there was a noise to distract you from the pain. If there is a noise it s internal. It screams and no one can hear it but you. It screams so loud your ears ring and your head aches. It trashes around in your chest like a great white shark caught in the sea it roars like a mother bear whose cub has been taken. That s what it looks like and that s what it sounds like a trashing panicking trapped great big beast roaring like a prisoner to its own emotions. But that s the thing about love no one is untouchable.
Cecelia Ahern
It is one thing to be brave in front of others, perhaps for fear of being branded a coward and becoming diminished in their eyes, but another entirely to be brave when there is nobody to witness your courage. The latter is an elemental bravery, a strength of spirit and character.
John Connolly
You know, Miss Holly, you look very dramatic like that, backlit by the fire. Very attractive, if I may say so. I know you shared a moment passionne with Artemis which he subsequently fouled up with his typical boorish behavior. Let me just throw something out there for you to consider while we're chasing the probe: I share Artemis's passion but not his boorishness. No pressure; just think about it.This was enough to elicit a deafening moment of silence even in the middle of a crisis, which Orion seemed to be blissfully unaffected by.
Eoin Colfer
If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.
Edmund Burke
His people had hogs there till the bottom fell out of hogs. The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see. So it was with the world, restless, kind of brutal. Always going on. Not waiting for no man.
Sebastian Barry
Stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.
Frank McCourt
Places ain't home. People is. Bricks and chairs is nothing.
Paul Kearney
Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
W.B. Yeats
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Right, well, we've got to work out what we need. We've got to work out what we need, how we get it, and what we need to get to get what we need.
Derek Landy
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
Jonathan Swift
The Englishman has all the qualities of a poker except its occasional warmth.
Daniel O'Connell
Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.
Colum McCann
An election is a moral horror as bad as a battle except for the blood a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
George Bernard Shaw
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Oscar Wilde
As learnèd commentators viewIn Homer more than Homer knew.
Jonathan Swift
Our real beliefs are generally not to be found at the level of ego.
Peter Rollins
Our hearts were drunk with a beauty our eyes could never see.
George W. Russell
I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
Brendan Behan
The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde
I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas into these articles. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous, subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blashphemous, and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and any one who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages.
George Bernard Shaw
Nobody played poker with Mike Walsh--at least, not twice--but people fought to get aboard Constellation. Her command record since Mike took her was almost the equal of Enterprise's for danger, daring, and success not only snatched from the jaws of failure, but afterward used to beat failure over the head.
Diane Duane
When good Americans die, they go to Paris.
Oscar Wilde
111 company is like a dog who dirts those most whom he loves best.
Jonathan Swift
Most of the people I know who are having trouble finding their life work are somewhat passive in style. They wait for something good to happen to them rather than make strong positive moves.
Thomas Moore
HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.
George Bernard Shaw
Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
George Bernard Shaw
Men marry because they are tired women because they are curious: both are disappointed.
Oscar Wilde
Very few men properly speaking live at present but are providing to live another time.
Jonathan Swift
In this messianic vision, machine intelligence will come to redeem the universe of its incalculable stupidity. He takes a goal-oriented approach to cosmology, imposing upon the universe itself a kind of corporate project-management structure, composed of a series of key deliverables across deep time.
Mark O'Connell
Sometomes that's all people ever really need. Just to know.
Cecelia Ahern
Men always want to be a woman`s first love - women like to be a man`s last romance.
Oscar Wilde
—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?—I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?
James Joyce
By the Hospital Lane goes the 'Faeries Path.' Every evening they travel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. At the sea end of their path stands a cottage. One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who lived there, left her door open, as she was expecting her son. Her husband was asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. After he had been sitting there for a while, the woman said, 'In the name of God, who are you?' He got up and went out, saying, 'Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.' She woke her husband and told him. 'One of the good people has been with us,' said he. ("Village Ghosts")
W.B. Yeats
Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.
Frank McCourt
I used to think this was all about good and evil,” said Rickett, “but it’s not.”“No?”“There’s a kind of evil that isn’t even in opposition to good, because good is an irrelevance to it. It’s a foulness that’s right at the heart of existence, born with the stuff of the universe. It’s in the decay to which all things tend. It is, and it always will be, but in dying we leave it behind.”“And while we’re alive?”“We set our souls against it, and our saints and angels, too.” He patted Parker on the shoulder. “Especially the destroying ones.
John Connolly
speak hard, steal the air.
Anne McCaffrey
I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.
George Bernard Shaw
Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.
Oscar Wilde
The greatest gift a parent can give a child is self-confidence.
Stewart Stafford
I’d live anywhere, - in one room, in the castle ruin right now – if it meant we could all just be together.
Cecelia Ahern
There's this magical place,' he says with mock solemnity, 'called a library--I don't know if you've heard of it, but they have books, and also newspaper, and back issues of newspapers...
Moïra Fowley-Doyle
We had no one else to learn this from- none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success- so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming.
Tana French
You love someone. You don’t leave her to drown. And you don’t tell her she’s crazier than she already knows that she is!
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Teaching is bringing the news.
Frank McCourt
Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
Heaven on Earth, we need it nowI'm sick of all of this hanging aroundSick of sorrow, sick of the painI'm sick of hearing again and againThat there's gonna be peace on Earth......Tell the ones who hear no soundWhose sons are living in the groundPeace on EarthNo whos or whysNo one cries like a mother criesFor peace on Earth
U2
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.—Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (1983)
Samuel Beckett
You are perfectly right in making some slight alteration. Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
Oscar Wilde
As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied
Oscar Wilde
I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds?
Tana French
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.
W.B. Yeats
You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you.
Oscar Wilde
A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them.... His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older.
Oscar Wilde
When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
Oscar Wilde
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
George Bernard Shaw
I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
Seamus Heaney
I saw the patterns of history and thought that a human might be eighty per cent chemicals, eighteen per cent his past, and two per cent feeling, creatures of habit. Which makes psychiatrists really pharmacists who have to listen longer.
Gerard Donovan