Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 46

The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights. But over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognition into a generalized demand for attention and the anger at specific injustice into a generalized feeling of grievance and resentment. The result is a culture of entitlement, attention-seeking and complaint.
Michael Foley
The old summer's-end melancholy nips at my heels. There's no school to go back to; no detail of my life will change come the onset of September; yet still, I feel the old trepidation.
Sara Baume
After Abalyn said what she said, I panicked. Someone tells me I can't remember what I definitely do remember, and sometimes I panic. I'm not as used to it as I often pretend. As I pretend to be used to it, I mean to say. The false memories.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
The strangest thing has happened. I really missed my dog. That's never happened to me before. You know, on a long tour you do hear people saying they miss their pets. I never have. But last night I started really missing my dog. It's very odd, 'cause I don't have a dog.
Bono
—Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.
James Joyce
The best lack all conviction while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats
Ariadne made an impression on you, and that's great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you're left watching somebody's body disintegrate. You start with a love story, you end up manacled to an hourglass, watching the sands run out.
Paul Murray
So the swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets...
Oscar Wilde
The politicians looked after the mandarins. The mandarins looked after the central bankers and the regulators. (The governor of the Central Bank was paid more in 2008 than the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, as was the chief executive of the Financial Regulator.) The Central Bankers looked after the bankers. The bankers looked after IBEC. And IBEC looked after the government. The circle of oligarchs was watertight.
Shane Ross
ld heads forgetful of their sins,Old, learned, respectable bald headsEdit and annotate the linesThat young men, tossing on their beds,Rhymed out in love’s despairTo flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;Wear out the carpet with their shoesEarning respect; have no strange friend;If they have sinned nobody knows.Lord, what would they sayShould their Catullus walk that way?
W.B. Yeats
No place in England where everyone can go is considered respectable.
George Moore
But once, in his anger, Aidan had asked me whether I thought I had wasted my life, and I had told him no. No, I had not. But I had been wrong. And Tom Cardle has been right. For I had known everything, right from the start, and never acted on any of it. I had blocked it from my mind time and again, refused to recognize what was staring me in the face. I had said nothing when I should have spoken out, convincing myself that I was a man of higher character. I had been complicit in all their crimes, and people had suffered because of me. I had wasted my life. I had wasted every moment of my life. And the final irony was that it had taken a convicted pedophile to show me that in my silence, I was just as guilty as the rest of them.
John Boyne
Silences have a climax when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
I am what prevents the Accelerator from being a bomb.""Except you didn't," said Gracious. "Because you weren't around.""I got bored.""You're a machine.""Machines can become bored, too."Gracious looked suddenly concerned. "My toaster is bored?""Perhaps, " said the Engineer. "I do not know many toasters.
Derek Landy
Skulduggery.""Fletcher."Fletcher stuck out his hand. Skulduggery observed it for a moment."I'm sorry, what are we doing now?""Shaking hands," Fletcher said. "Like adults. I just want you to know that this past year has changed me. I've grown, as a person. I'm not the same Fletcher you used to know."You look a lot like him.""Well, yeah, but-""And you have the same ridiculous hair.""Can we just shake hands?""Of course we can," Skulduggery said, and they shook. "Now what?""I, uh...I don't really know. What do adults usually do after they shake hands?""Generally, the first thing they do is let go.""Oh, right," Fletcher said, and Skulduggery took his hand back. "So, Skulduggery, how have you been? You're looking well. That's a really nice tie."It's blue.""And such a nice shade."Skulduggery looked at Valkyrie. "You promised me he wouldn't be annoying.
Derek Landy
Ireland is a fatal disease fatal to Englishmen and doubly fatal to Irishmen.
George Moore
To deny someone's feelings or experiences it to literally deny their reality.
Danu Morrigan
It gives the war a whole new dimension, you know, hearing from someone right there in the thick of it. They really connected with it.’‘Maybe it reminds them of school,’ she suggests. ‘Didn’t someone describe the trenches as ninety-nine per cent boredom and one per cent terror?’‘I don’t know about boredom. God, the chaos of it, the brutality. And it’s so vivid. I’d definitely be interested in reading his poetry, if only to see how he can go from describing, you know, people getting their guts blown out, to writing about love.’‘Maybe it’s not that much of a leap,’ she says.
Paul Murray
The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding. The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love - that's the reason one should never marry.
Oscar Wilde
But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.
Oscar Wilde
He repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.
Oscar Wilde
The reason I'm attracted to the light of Scripture is because there's another side of me that is dark. The reason I am interested in men of peace is because I'm not like them and would like to be. I'm not someone in real life who turns the other cheek.
Bono
Time is a waste of money.
Oscar Wilde
I love stepping back in time
Frances McCarthy
You’re wrong about one thing: fairy-tales do exist. Millions of existing parents read existing fairy-tales every night from existing books to kids who, funnily enough...’‘... exist, yeah, I know. I mean it’s fantasy, not reality.
Jonathan Dunne
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
Oscar Wilde
Breslin gives me his wise-teacher smile, which is kind and crinkly and would make me feel warm all over if I was dumber than a bag of hair.
Tana French
The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.
Samuel Beckett
It’s a full-time job being homeless. It’s a full-time job being poor.
John Connolly
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.All art is quite useless.
Oscar Wilde
When the big things in our life start changing, we rely more heavily on small certainties to make us feel secure.
Kate Kerrigan
... With a slight miscalculated leap cleared to the iron picket fence. Put the fear of God into me, picket fences and balls don't mix.
J.P. Donleavy
It happens so seldom; I must catch and keep this slender yearning, a rare beetle in a jam-jar trap. But mustering will is not the same as wanting. I lie in the garden and think about all the footsteps between my body on the grass and my pencil-case and notebook on the table in the sun room. All the muscles I have to flex and relax to get myself there.
Sara Baume
You can have anything you want so long as you realise that you can't have everything you want.
Orna Ross
Are we to have nothing tonight?" said one of them, with a low laugh, as she pointed to the bag which he had thrown upon the floor, and which moved as though there were some living thing within it. For answer he nodded his head. One of the women jumped forward and opened it. If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low wail, as of a half smothered child. The women closed round, whilst I was aghast with horror. But as I looked, they disappeared, and with them the dreadful bag.
Bram Stoker
Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower...
Iris Murdoch
All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
Seán O'Casey
That vice has often proved an emancipator of the mind, is one of the most humiliating, but, at the same time, one of the most unquestionable facts in history.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
This was what we did as a species, after all: we built ingenious devices, and we destroyed things.
Mark O'Connell
Harper to your word be trueHolder, crafter you also hewTo honesty, integrity, and respectAll others without regard to intellect
Anne McCaffrey
May you live all the days of your life.
Jonathan Swift
Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,My heart is as some famine-murdered land Whence all good things have perished utterly, And well I know my soul in Hell must lieIf this night before God's throne should stand.
Oscar Wilde
You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics; in physical laws every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It's clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I'm absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that "as you reap, so you will sow" stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I've done a lot of stupid stuff. But I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep s---. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity
Bono
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating- people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Knock yourself out... Or rather, don't.
Eoin Colfer
I'm going to photograph every single person to enter and leave this tattoo parlour." Finbar rolled his eyes. "And they'll hate that, because people who get dragons drawn on their backs are normally so shy about other people noticing them.
Derek Landy
People forget they have options. And they forget that those things don't really matter. They should concentrate on what they have and not what they don't have. And by the way, wishing and dreaming doesn't mean concentrating on what you don't have, it's positive thinking that encourages hoping and believing, not whinging and moaning.
Cecelia Ahern
I am afraid of him now. The one I love most in the world.
Neil Jordan
The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface.[Alluding to Joseph Priestley's Observations on Air]
Edmund Burke
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.
George Bernard Shaw
Suddenly they were dancing, holding each other tight, moving in circles that symbolised their relationship, both afraid to let go, both willing the song to continue while silently their insides tore.
Anna McPartlin
Life is limited, but by writing, and reading, we can live in different worlds, get inside the skins and minds of other people, and, in this way, push out the boundaries of our own lifes.
Joan Lingard
Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.
Samuel Beckett
People move around so much in the world, things get lost.
Emma Donoghue
World is suddener than we fancy it.
Louis MacNeice
It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble how hopeless the outlook how muddled the tangle how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. If only you could love enough you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world.
Emmet Fox
Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.
Hugo Hamilton
There is a courageous wisdom there is also a false reptile prudence the result not of caution but of fear.
Edmund Burke
I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important
Iris Murdoch
they comedifferent and the samewith each it is different and the samewith each the absence of love is differentwith each the absence of love is the same
Samuel Beckett