Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 48

Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.
Bono
Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.
Iris Murdoch
Science knows it doesn't know everything; otherwise, it'd stop. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.
Dara Ó Briain
I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.
Bram Stoker
but curiosity is a restless and scrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
She was drawn to damaged souls like a moth to a flame. 
Anna McPartlin
Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.
Oscar Wilde
No one knows how strong they are until they have to be.
Marian Keyes
You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.
John Banville
It is very difficult sometimes to keep awake, especially at church, but there is no difficulty at all about sleeping.
Oscar Wilde
He who seeks for applause only from without has all his happiness in another's keeping.
Oliver Goldsmith
Oh, Alan Ryves," she said. "You're such a fantastic liar. You are the smoothest con man of them all.
Sarah Rees Brennan
It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.
Brendan Behan
This is true joy of life-the being used for a purpose that is recognized by yourself as a right one instead of being a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
George Bernard Shaw
Circumstances are the rulers of the weak they are but the instruments of the wise.
Samuel Lover
Desire for power is a kind of greed indulged by the unfulfilled
Michael Foley
people in new york are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they're invited to step into.
Joseph O'Neill
What am I supposed to do when the best part of me was always you?And what am I supposed to say when I'm all choked up and you're ok?
The Script
We're being lead by an idiot with a crayon.
Eoin Colfer
When I am lonely for boys what I miss is their bodies. The smell of their skin, its saltiness. The rough whisper of stubble against my cheek. The strong firm hands, the way they rest on the curve of my back.
A.M. Harte
He knows nothing he thinks he knows everything - that clearly points to a political career.
George Bernard Shaw
For the yesterdays and todays, and the tomorrows I can hardly wait for - Thank you.
Cecelia Ahern
Power. It's all about that, don't you forget. People want money or power.
Cecelia Ahern
As a rule, I had murder in my mind. That day, I had it in my heart.
Jane Casey
We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.
Iris Murdoch
My mother. I don't think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers.
Samuel Beckett
As long as you're around, your life is too. So just as you shower love and affection and attention on the husbands, wives, parents, children and forever friends who surround you, you have to do so equally with your life, because it's yours, it's you, and it's always there rooting for you, cheering you on, even when you feel like you can't do it. I gave up on my life for a while, but what I've learned is that even when that happens and especially when that happens, life never gives up on you. Mine didn't. And we'll be there for each other until those final moments when we will look at each other and say, 'Thanks for staying until the end.'And that's the truth.
Cecelia Ahern
Hope is some extraordinary spiritual grace that God gives us to control our fears, not to oust them.
Vincent McNabb
Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.
George Bernard Shaw
I always remember your own grandmother, she continued, nodding her head, old Mrs. Taylor. She died on a Christmas Night.Oh, I said shivering. I wouldn't like to die on a Christmas Night. A good night to die, she smiled; they say that the gates of heaven are open on Christmas Night.
Alice Taylor
There was all the world and his wife.
Jonathan Swift
The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great.
Oscar Wilde
But you are proof that you can think you know someone yet never really know them at all.
Cecelia Ahern Ahern
We watch television and we play music, but mostly we've found ways to amuse ourselves." "Really?" Valkyrie asked. "Like what?"Plight's smile faded. "Like human sacrifice."He grabbed one arm and Lenka grabbed the other and Valkyrie cried out.They both let go, laughing."Naw," Plight said," we just play board games.
Derek Landy
Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
George Bernard Shaw
I stop reading after half an hour. I’ve had enough. Humanity has hit a brick wall. We’re facing our end, like the dinosaurs millions of years before us. The only difference is we’ve got journalists on hand to document every blow and setback, cataloguing our rapid, painful downfall in vibrant, vicious detail. Personally, I think the dinosaurs had the better deal. When it comes to impending, unavoidable extinction, ignorance is bliss.
Darren Shan
Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
George Bernard Shaw
And yet sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation ... Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant.
Samuel Beckett
And tonight Mary could taste bitterness going down like a nut, settling in her stomach. It planted itself, put down roots, and began to grow, nourished on her dark blood.
Emma Donoghue
Why can't I solve this problem by killing someone? she though petulantly, then comforted herself with the mantra that had kept her going in prison: "Soon all the humans will be dead," she said, droning in the time-honored fashion of gurus everywhere. "And then Opal will be loved."And even if I'm not loved, she thought, at least all the humans will be dead.
Eoin Colfer
Can I have my ear back?" He asked irritably.She blinked."Mother, can you tell this creature here to loosen her hold?
Anya Wylde
The big trinity of publishing: mystery, thrillers and romance. If you can combine all three, then it’s a winner’s trifecta and you’ll be rich beyond your dreams.
Dermot Davis
My doctor says I must not have any serious conversation after seven [o'clock]. It makes me talk in my sleep.
Oscar Wilde
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.
Oscar Wilde
She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.
Elizabeth Bowen
nothing that is worth knowing can be taught
Oscar Wilde
I don't have your way with words "Sin said. "So I'm just going to go with a quick response. Ha
Sarah Rees Brennan
But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.
Oscar Wilde
I saw you put rice in a toaster once," said Mae. "I was there when made the tin of beans explode.""It was faulty," Jamie protested, his eyes shifty. " I am sure of this.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Joy is the will which labors which overcomes obstacles which knows triumph.
William Butler Yeats
He’d have denied it to his dying breath but Derwent wasn’t as tough as he pretended to be. For the very small number of people he cared about, Derwent would give his all. It made him vulnerable, and every now and then that vulnerability showed.
Jane Casey
Experience has taught me that what you love, you should love all the harder because someday it will be gone.
Ronan O'Brien
I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity.
Oscar Wilde
every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.
Oscar Wilde
. . . a wind howling began, which seemed to form all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night.
Bram Stoker
Because I am an officer and a gentleman they have given me my notebooks, pen, ink and paper. So I write and wait. I am committed to no cause, I love no living person. The fact that I have no future except what you can count in hours doesn't seem to disturb me unduly. After all, the future whether here or there is equally unknown. So for the waiting days I have only the past to play about with. I can juggle with a series of possibly inaccurate memories, my own interpretation, for what is worth, of events. There is no place for speculation or hope, or even dreams. Strangely enough I think I like it like that.
Jennifer Johnston
Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.
Oscar Wilde
Whatever little we have gained we have gained by agitation while we have uniformly lost by moderation.
Daniel O'Connell
If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.
Oscar Wilde
How extraordinary the ordinary really is, a tool we all use to keep going, a template for sanity.
Cecelia Ahern