Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 4

You could have kept on driving and never looked back. No one's ever had to stop for me. Or even hear me. Anyway, you did, and now I'm afraid the time for choice is behind us both.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Nemo intrat in caelum nisi per philosophiam
Johannes Scotus Eriugena
Seen no matter how and said as seen. Dread of black. Of white. Of void. Let her vanish. And the rest. For good.
Samuel Beckett
Life is a precious commodity, Charles. It’s time you achieved your full potential and learned the true value of things.” “You’re talking like a Stalinist!” I cried. “People don’t get jobs to achieve things and learn values! They do it because they have to, and then they use whatever’s left over to buy themselves nice things that make them feel less bad about having jobs!
Paul Murray
You should have called us. Desmond would have picked you up.''No I wouldn't,' Valkyrie's dad said, stepping into earshot. 'Sorry, Fletcher, but I had important fatherly duties to take care of, which included eating breakfast, showering, and finding my trousers. Of those three, I only managed two. Without looking down, can you guess which one I missed?'... Fletcher smiled back. 'I just want to borrow Stephanie for a moment.''Take our daughter,' Valkryie's dad said, waving a hand airily. 'We have another one now.
Derek Landy
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.
Oscar Wilde
Someone once said that nostalgia is longing for a place you’d never go back to and thinking about it… that’s pretty much how I’m feeling about my ex-husband: longing for someone I’d never go back to.
Dermot Davis
You don't stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.
George Bernard Shaw
Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming about him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures.
Oscar Wilde
Valkyrie smiled patiently. "I like how you do your make-up. Do you use a brush, or just dip your head in the bucket?
Derek Landy
And what are your interests and hobbies, Nicholas?" Annabel asked faintly, sounding like a cross between a television interviewer and a hostage. Nick considered this for a minute, and then said "I like swords." Annabel leaned over her plate and asked, her voice changing "You fence?" "Not exactly," Nick drawled. "I'm more freestyle.
Sarah Rees Brennan
The trust of those in dark need is forgiving work.
Sebastian Barry
I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.
Tana French
They were in a position of total ignorance and people in that position often died without being enlightened.
Eoin Colfer
Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .
Oscar Wilde
Everybody means by an open mind, a mind which contains their prejudices but not somebody else's.
John Oulton Wisdom
People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Oscar Wilde
The past and present are after all so close, almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.
Iris Murdoch
I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.
Edna O'Brien
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong which is but saying ... that he is wiser today than yesterday.
Jonathan Swift
With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.
Oscar Wilde
For all that "I was lost, I am found," it is probably more accurate to say, "I was really lost, I'm a little less so at the moment.
Bono
A true gentlemen is one who is never unintentionally rude.
Oscar Wilde
Our memories are independent of our wills. It is not so easy to forget.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
I only wish you could spend just five minutes beneath my skin and feel what it’s like. Feel the savage swarming magic I feel.
Claire-Louise Bennett
Peace is the opposite of dreaming. It’s built slowly and surely through brutal compromises and tiny victories that you don’t even see. It’s a messy business, bringing peace into the world.
Bono
There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word, DRACULA.
Bram Stoker
It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Edmund Burke
Many years ago, plunging was discovered when the moon was in two halves- it's all about dreams, you see
William O'Brien
And still they gazed and still the wonder grew That one small head should carry all it knew.
Oliver Goldsmith
If it had been a great necessity, if it had been contingents of an army meeting to overwhelm the enemy by stealth, it might not have worked out so neatly. But fate it would seem is a perfect strategist and will work miracles of timing to assist our destruction.
Sebastian Barry
It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is
W.B. Yeats
Certainly nothing is unnatural that is not physically impossible.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
It's all very well to say beauty is under the skin, or in the eye of the beholder, but no-one would say no to being prettier if they had the chance, so it is all rot.
Paul Kearney
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
Seamus Heaney
Life is about trying to find our ways back to our one shared soul. When we’re looking out at the stars, we’re looking into ourselves.
Edward Fahey
Yes?" she asked, eyeing me guardedly.I struck out a hand and said "Shake."Arra stared at the hand, then into my unfocused eyes. "One good fight doesn't make you a warrior," she said."Shake!" I repeated angrily."And if I don't?" she asked."I'll get back up on the bars and fight you till you do," I growled.Arra studied me at length, then nodded and took my hand. "Power to you, Darren Shan," she said gruffly."Power," I repeated weakly, then fainted into her arms and knew no more till I came to in my hammock the next night.
Darren Shan
...friendship is something you do.
Nuala O'Faolain
God is the source of my supply. His riches flow to me freely, copiously, and abundantly. All my financial and other needs are met at every moment of time and point of space; there is always a divine surplus.
Joseph Murphy
The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.
Samuel Beckett
I'd rather eat nothing than eat a carrot.
Marian Keyes
Astride of a grave and a difficult birth.Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps.We have time to grow old.The air is full of our cries.But habit is a great deadener.At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing.Let him sleep on.
Samuel Beckett
But he drank a lot. When love dies, he told me, there are no survivors.
Eion Colfer
In my experience, boys are predictable. As soon as they think of something, they do it. Girls are smarter—they plan ahead. They think about not getting caught.
Eoin Colfer
Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known
Oscar Wilde
But glad to have sat underThunder and rain with you,And grateful tooFor sunlight on the garden.
Louis MacNeice
Will you promise to keep this to yourself, to not tell anyone of what we are?” By his words you’d think he was giving me a choice. Like I could say,no deal, honey bunch, I’m off to shout your secret from the rooftops, and he’d be like, oh no please don’t do that. Inreality, he’d have to kill me.
L.H. Cosway
...even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become to small to contain my misery.
Joseph O'Neill
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.
Oscar Wilde
How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June… . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!
Oscar Wilde
I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
W.B. Yeats
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious
Oscar Wilde
And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended.
Lord Dunsany
Never shall a young man,Thrown into despairBy those great honey-colouredRamparts at your ear,Love you for yourself aloneAnd not your yellow hair.
W.B. Yeats
I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.
Oscar Wilde
I don't like remembering the way that hurt her. Hurts her. I'm sure it still does; I'm just not around to see, and I don't like dwelling on that, either. That's only normal. Missing people you still love, and not wanting to see them in pain and angry and humiliated.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Certain battles were won by retreating.
Eoin Colfer
What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattery.
George Bernard Shaw
Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.
Oscar Wilde
They drink from streams whose waters taste like tears, and indeed each swallow fills them with a few heartbeats of deep sadness.
Peadar Ó Guilín