Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 45

Have you ever heard of the theory of relativity?"Artemis blinked. "Is this a joke? I have traveled through time, Doctor. I think I know a little something about relativity.
Eoin Colfer
The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.
Bishop WC. Magee
How few human beings, the major thought with a sigh, can exert by hard work, thrift, intelligence or any other virtue the slightest influence on their own destiny.
FARRELL J.G.
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
Oscar Wilde
How's Alison getting on?'Conway snorted. 'Tucked up in the sick room like she's dying in some season finale. Little fadey voice on her and all. She's having a great old time.
Tana French
I have always thought foreigners with their unusual skin colours, mad languages and ignorant customs absolutely hilarious, and I think it's a shame that in recent years its become unfashionable to poke fun at them. I certainly don't think they themselves ever minded it.
Arthur Mathews
Good artists exist simply in what they make and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
Oscar Wilde
You may remember that on earth—though of course we never confessed it—the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.
George Bernard Shaw
Punctuality is the thief of time
Oscar Wilde
A real scientist solves problems, not wails that they are unsolvable.
Anne McCaffrey
Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
A picture is just a picture, but add music and there's emotion. There's a story.
L.H. Cosway
They appeared to me like a thin veil of mist, translucent, almost- not quite there. But for all their misty peculiarity, they were as clear to me as the minnows in the shallows and the foxgloves on the riverbank and the butterflies fanning their wings. They flitted from flower to flower, as swift as dragonflies, sometimes glowing brightly like a candle flame suddenly catching, sometimes fading like a breath of warm air on glass, so that you would never know they had been there at all. Yet there they were. And there I was, watching them.
Hazel Gaynor
Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque?
Sara Baume
when happiness makes a guest appearance in one's life,it's important to make the most of it.It may not stay around for long and when it has gone wouldn't it be terrible to think that all the time one could have been happy was wasted worrying when the happiness would be taken away.
Marian Keyes
Courage does not take over, it fights and struggles through every word you say and every step you take. It's a battle or a dance as to whether you let it pervade. It takes courage to overcome, but it takes extreme fear to be courageous.
Cecelia Ahern
Unhappiness where's when I was young, And we didn't give a damn, 'Cause we were raised, To see life as fun and take it if we can.
Dolores O'Riordan
Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
Oscar Wilde
The master says it’s a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it’s a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there’s anyone in the world who would like us to live.
Frank McCourt
I'll tell you a story about Johnny Magory!
Emma-Jane Leeson
I am cold, even though the heat of early summer is adequate. I am cold because I cannot find my heart.
Sebastian Barry
He sometimes halted without saying anything. Either he had finally nothing to say or while having something to say he finally decided not to say it.
Samuel Beckett
If we possess narrative sympathy - enabling us to see the world from other's point of view - we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love.
Richard Kearney
Inteligence lives longer than beauty.
Oscar Wilde
Sarah...loved the way the light lit the silence first thing in the morning.
Niamh Boyce
When I saw something that needed doing I did it.
Nellie Cashman
It has always seemed to me that there are two types of people in this world: those rendered impotent by the sheer weight of evil it contains, and who refuse to act because they see no point, and those who choose their battles and fight them to the end, as they understand that to do nothing is definitely worse than to do something and fail. --The Collector
John Connolly
It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield
W.B. Yeats
It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain.It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.
Oscar Wilde
You are not there, Father,” I cried. “I wake up at Gaudlin Hall, I spend most of my day there, I sleep there at night. And throughout it all there is but one thought running through my mind.”“And that is?”“This house is haunted.
John Boyne
We had, like I said before. . .we had to prevent life. We had to kill. It’s as simple as that.” —STEVE MASSOF
Ann McElhinney
I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love.
Oscar Wilde
Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly -- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self.
Oscar Wilde
We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
Oscar Wilde
It is something like the way dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper root for its causes than we have knowledge of.
Bram Stoker
I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.
Oscar Wilde
Before she came ill, David's mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. (...) Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by torch light beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. (...) They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.
John Connolly
One knows so well the popular idea of health: the English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the unbeatable.
Oscar Wilde
What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God's name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But, though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages, still God remained always the same God and God's real name was God.
James Joyce
One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second.
Samuel Beckett
I don't want to earn my living, I want to live.
Oscar Wilde
Girlfriends aren’t allowed to care if you have Stilton socks. Friends are.” All the same, she gave her hands a quick, professional shake and took hold of my foot. “Plus, you might be less of a pain in the arse if you got more action.
Tana French
The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.
Oliver Goldsmith
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde
Our view of the mind not only shapes our view of ourselves; less obviously, it also shapes our view of that part of our experience we conceive of as dealing with the external world. As we learn about the structure of this aspect of experience, we find that the world presents itself to consciousness only after being mediated to lesser or (more often) greater extents by mental structures and processes.
Sean O Nuallain
I need some space.""Because of my past?""No, because of mine. When I'm around you I feel like I'm falling. I need to stop before I smash into the ground.""Are you always so honest?""No. Mostly I'm a liar like you.
Anna McPartlin
Stephanie had no problem doing what shewas told, just so long as she was given a good reason why sheshould.
Derek Landy
Everybody's looking for that somethingOne thing that makes it all completeYou'll find it in the strangest placesPlaces you never knew it could beSome find it in the face of their childrenSome find it in their lover's eyesWho can deny the joy it brings?When you've found that special thingYou're flying without wingsSome find it sharing every morningSome in their solitary nightsYou'll find it in the words of othersA simple line can make you laugh or cryYou'll find it in the deepest friendshipThe kind you cherish all your lifeAnd when you know how much that meansYou've found that special thingYou're flying without wingsSo impossible as they may seemYou've got to fight for every dream‘Cause who's to know which one you let goWould have made you complete
Westlife
Talking about ideas for a novel is a bit like showing pictures of the ultrasound if you're pregnant. Until they're out in the world, they can only be wonderful to you.
Clare Boylan
I spit into the face of Time That has transfigured me.
W.B. Yeats
SummerThe seasons between spring and autumn, comprising in the Northern Hemispherethe warmest months of the year: June, July and August. The period of finest development, perfection, or beauty previous to any decline; the summer of life.― Cecilia Ahern
Cecilia Ahern
He tried to tell me week after week to accept things as they were and move on with my life. But if there was one man who had put his life on hold to wait for something or someone, it was him.
Cecelia Ahern
There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.
Jack Lynch
All I want now is to look at life.
Oscar Wilde
So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (...)
Oscar Wilde
They'd listen silenty, with grave faces: but once they'd turn to each other they'd smile cruelly. He couldn't have it both ways. He'd put himself outside and outside they'd make him stay. Neither brutality nor complaining could force a way in.
John McGahern
The [Israelis] believed - they were possessed of an absolute certainty and conviction - that 'terrorists' were in Chatila. How could I explain to them that the terrorists had left, that the terrorists had worn Israeli uniforms, that the terrorists had been sent into Chatila by Israeli officers, that the victims of the terrorists were not Israelis but Palestinians and Lebanese?
Robert Fisk
In the firmament of science Mayer and Joule constitute a double star, the light of each being in a certain sense complementary to that of the other.
John Tyndall
FatherMichael:OK we should get on with this; I don’t want to be late for my 2 o’clock. First I have to ask, is there anyone in here who thinks there is any reason why these two should not be married?LonelyLady:Yes.SureOne:I could give more than one reason.Buttercup:Hell yes.SoOverHim:DON’T DO IT!
Cecelia Ahern
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
George Bernard Shaw