Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 40

Even in death, may you be triumphant
Darren Shan
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
Oscar Wilde
I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.
Oscar Wilde
I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.
James Joyce
The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American slavery in place. Sometimes it withered him just to keep his mind steady. He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction. And the recognition of complexity was to be balanced against the need for simplicity. He was still a slave. Fugitive. If he returned to Boston he could be kidnapped at any time, taken south, strapped to a tree, whipped. His owners. They would make a spectacle of his fame. They had tried to silence him for many years already. No longer. He had been given a chance to speak out against what had held him in chains. And he would continue to do so until the links lay in pieces at his feet.
Colum McCann
A funeral is like a little game, really. You have to just play along and say the right thing and behave the right way until it’s over. Be pleasant but don’t smile too much; be sad but don’t overdo it or the family will feel worse than they already do. Be hopeful but don’t let your optimism be taken as a lack of empathy or an inability to deal with the reality. Because if anybody was to be truly honest there would be a lot of arguments, finger-pointing, tears, snot, and screaming.
Cecelia Ahern
Regardless of the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can't have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it's a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that's worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.
Tana French
The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.
Oscar Wilde
I also believe that when people are going through difficult situations in life... it causes them to search a lot more. They search life and search their soul. When you’re searching, you’re suddenly a lot more open to the world around you, to the possibilities, to things you never thought about before. — When you’re happy, you don’t question the world so much. When you’re lost, you question everything. The very reason why it is so essential to human self-discovery
Cecelia Ahern
He was comparing you to the butterflies that you both adore and cherish, and he said you were special for the same reasons: you were rare, exotic and entirely you. He said you're beautiful exactly the way are now.
Cecelia Ahern
I am here because I have to be here, as here I am supposed to be! All things should be, and usually are, found in their rightful places. Can you imagine how chaotic the world would be if nothing was in its correct place?
William O'Brien
Canada is a society rather than a nation.
Kildare Dobbs
She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.
Oscar Wilde
I was wrong to try and impose something of my humanity on you, when being human never did me any good
Sara Baume
When all is said and done, how do we not know but that our own unreason may be better than another’s truth? for it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey. Come into the world again, wild bees, wild bees!
W.B. Yeats
Failure is only the name that we give to our mistakes."-Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.
Samuel Beckett
In dreams begin responsibilities.
W.B. Yeats
We cannot help where we are born or how we are raised," Tel Hesani said. "But we can reject the twisted beliefs of those around us if we need to. Our loved ones and elders don't always know what is best. A man should listen to his heart and make his own decisions about what is wrong and what is right.
Darren Shan
In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?
Samuel Beckett
If you do not love me I shall not be loved. If I do not love you I shall not love.
Samuel Beckett
I believe in the discipline of silence and could talk for hours about it.
George Bernard Shaw
It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.
George Bernard Shaw
A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.
Oscar Wilde
ESTRAGON: Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!VLADIMIR: Did I ever leave you?ESTRAGON: You let me go.
Samuel Beckett
This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins.
Sara Baume
JACKYour duty as a gentleman calls you back. ALGERNONMy duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.
Oscar Wilde
Taking him for all and all, I think it will be conceded that Michael Faraday was the greatest experimental philosopher the world has ever seen.
John Tyndall
What do they be teaching the young these days? I declare, they think more on machines and formulas than they do on the true knowledge of the world. They blow things up, and call it progress. They kills one another by the million, and calls it civilization... But you takes a single life, just one, and that is murder most foul, and they will pin you for that, and lay it against you the rest of your life. It hardly seems fair.
Paul Kearney
A man or a woman can inspire such deep fantasy and emotion that through the lovemaking embrace of a partners body we make break through the limits of the human condition to touch upon another level of reality.
Thomas Moore
Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.
George Bernard Shaw
His body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own people to whom he was pledged. Three million. They were the currency of his freedom.
Colum McCann
I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.
Oscar Wilde
Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.
Edna O'Brien
I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.
Oscar Wilde
When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn't want to be a failure so I did ten times more work.
George Bernard Shaw
The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parents' first duty.
George Bernard Shaw
We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.
George Bernard Shaw
Bread – like real love – took time, cultivation, strong loving hands and patience. It lived, rising and growing to fruition only under the most perfect circumstances.
Melissa Hill
The day we stop learning is the day we die.
Michael Scott
To hell with you all, I DO believe
Cecelia Ahern
. . . buzzed up by the knowledge that none of my family knew where I was, who I was with nor when I'd be home again. I didn't even know exactly who I was with or when I'd be home again or where home really was anymore.
Sara Baume
There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me think of twilight and mists and dead maidens. Tonight it tinkled in my mouth like secret laughter.
John Banville
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.
Oscar Wilde
The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.
W.B. Yeats
What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.American novels, answered Lord Henry.
Oscar Wilde
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
Oscar Wilde
No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.
Alexander Cockburn
We have the power to bend all men to our whim, but are forever pushing ourselves further, trying to fly higher… and falling.
Darren Shan
I’m interested in this humbler approach, one that is more accepting of human foibles, and indeed sees dignity and peace as emerging more from that acceptance than from any method of transcending the human condition.
Thomas Moore
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted when you find it taken for granted you are unnerved.
Elizabeth Bowen
If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentleman he may pronounce as he pleases.
George Bernard Shaw
Incontinent the void. The zenith. Evening again. When not night it will be evening. Death again of deathless day. On one hand embers. On the other ashes. Day without end won and lost. Unseen.
Samuel Beckett
I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
Oscar Wilde
But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.
Iris Murdoch
Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
George Bernard Shaw
One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.
Oscar Wilde
Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worse habits.
Oscar Wilde
I know not whether laws be right Or whether laws be wrong All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong And that each day is like a year A year whose days are long.
Oscar Wilde
We have to start from the ground up and reconsider what education is. In my language, I'd like to see us educate the soul, and not just the mind. The result would be a person who could be in the world creatively, make good friendships, live in a place he loved, do work that is rewarding, and make a contribution to the community. People say that the word "educate" means to "draw out" a person's potential. But I like the "duc" - part in the middle of it. To be educated is to become a duke, a leader, a person of stature and color, a presence and a character.
Thomas Moore