Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 52

Different men view the same things in different ways. And the same men in the course of a few years alter their whole view of life. They have simply changed their companions on the road. Indeed the breaking with one set of people and the forming ties of friendship with others of a different type is often but the outward evidence and result of a hidden and inward change of the more intimate friendships of the mind.
Basil W. Maturin
I was well aware how famously or infamously secretive these old institutions can be, no more than ourselves, a mixture of worry, lost power, perhaps even concern. That the truth may not always be desirable, that one thing leads to another thing, that facts not only lead forward to resolution, but backwards into the shadows, and sometimes into the various little hells we make for each other.
Sebastian Barry
That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.
Jonathan Swift
Possession they say is eleven points of the law.
Jonathan Swift
Every life is many days day after day. We walk through ourselves meeting robbers ghosts giants old men young men wives widows brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.
James Joyce
If you were going to be best friends with anyone - Kevin - you had to hate a lot of other people, the two of you, together. It made you better friends.
Roddy Doyle
The one charm about the past is that it is the past.
Oscar Wilde
Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.)
Samuel Beckett
My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
George Bernard Shaw
She roared with laughter. Passersby gave her strange looks, but she didn’t care. If she’d been able to stretch her vision to see beyond the trees he disappeared behind, she would have stopped laughing. She would have seen the couple who’d been in the dark street near the restaurant the previous night, again breaking into laughter when he felt it was safe to abandon the Wally persona. Everywhere she saw that one man, she didn’t see the woman behind him, with him, beside him, urging him on, supporting him. If she had, she might have wondered then who the display was really for.
Cecelia Ahern
I've hated some of them too. Most of them sometimes. And they do think differently, but that's a good thing, isn't it? A hand isn't a f-foot, but I need them both to hunt.
Peadar Ó Guilín
Every once in a while, I get the urge. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? The urge for destruction. The urge to hurt, maim, kill. It’s quite a thing, to experience that urge, to let it wash over you, to give in to it. It’s addictive. It’s all-consuming. You lose yourself to it. It’s quite, quite wonderful. I can feel it, even as I speak, tapping around the edges of my mind, trying to prise me open, slip its fingers in. And it would be so easy to let it happen. But we’re all like that, aren’t we? We’re all barbarians at our core. We’re all savage, murderous beasts. I know I am. I’m sure you are. The only difference between us, Mr Prave, is how loudly we roar. I know I roar very loudly indeed. How about you? Do you think you can match me?
Derek Landy
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.
Oscar Wilde
Of course to one so modern as I am, `Enfant de mon siècle,’ merely to look at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose. It has always been so with me from my boyhood. There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer. Like Gautier, I have always been one of those ‘pour qui le monde visible existe.
Oscar Wilde
Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
If we could only have this life for one more day. If we could only turn back time. You know I'll be your life, your voice, your reason to be. My love, my heart is breathing for this moment in time. I'll find the words to say before you leave me today.
One Direction
Never mind what I say. I am always saying what I shouldn't say. In fact, I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.
Oscar Wilde
There's none so blind as they that won't see.
Jonathan Swift
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
Oscar Wilde
A kiss may ruin a human life
Oscar Wilde
No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him...As for the virtuous poor...they have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very poor pottage.
Oscar Wilde
I was in doubt, and then everything took a hue of unreality, and I did not know what to trust, even the evidence of my own senses. Not knowing what to trust, I did not know what to do; and so had only to keep on working in what had hitherto been the groove of my life. The groove ceased to avail me, and I mistrusted myself.
Bram Stoker
The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
Colum McCann
Happiness and beauty are by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.
George Bernard Shaw
You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow and its beauty.
Oscar Wilde
The God I believe in isn't short on cash, mister.
Bono
Journalism can be lethal
Robert Fisk
mostly we've had to 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.Then they both let go. laughing."Naw," Plight said, we just play board games."..."she fell for it!" gasped Lenka. "She fell for the human sacrifice bit!
Derek Landy
And to the little Squirrel who lived in the fir-tree, and was lonely, he said, 'Where is my mother?' And the Squirrel answered, 'Thou hast slain mine. Dost thou seek to slay thine also?
Oscar Wilde
And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, 'You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.
Oscar Wilde
The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
George Bernard Shaw
We stood side by side, and for that minute, in the stillness of that room, he was not the King. I was not not the Princess, taken against her will to the City. We were two people trying to forget.
Anna Carey
The friendship that like live is warm; a love like friendship, steady.
Thomas Moore
An educated person's ideas of Art are drwan naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends.
Oscar Wilde
The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.
George Bernard Shaw
God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.
Bono
She looked defeated, a castle stormed, torn down, with no one living inside. She looked like a hollowed-out creature, only shell and no soul.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Snatch religion back from the clerics and literature from the critics.
Michael Foley
Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.
Oscar Wilde
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
Oscar Wilde
It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end. Let whoever canwin glory before death. When a warrior is gone,that will be his best and only bulwark.
Seamus Heaney
Existentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the problem without really facing it: to solve it by attributing to the individual an empty, lonely freedom, a freedom, if he wishes, to 'fly in the face of the facts'. What it pictures is indeed the fearful solitude of the individual marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts, and morality escaping from science only by a wild leap of the will. But our situation is not like this.
Iris Murdoch
Cold,cold water,surrounds me now,and all I've got is your hand.
Damien Rice
God promised men that obedient women would be found on all corners of the Earth. I've been all over the Earth, and I call bullshit on that!" Alec snapped as he glared directly at me.I snorted. "I hate to burst your bubble, but God also made the Earth round, he's got jokes.
L.A. Casey
All men are mad in some way or another, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen too, the rest of the world.
Bram Stoker
I've never looked for women. When I was a teenager, perhaps. But they are looking for us, and we [men] must learn that very quickly. They decide. We just turn up. Never mind the superficialities – tall and handsome and all that. Just turn up
Peter O'Toole
A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.
George Bernard Shaw
…progress isn't necessarily about change but about things turning out as we want them to
Phil Hogan
We all get lost once in a while, sometimes by choice, sometimes due to forces beyond our control. When we learn what it is our soul needs to learn, the path presents itself. Sometimes we see the way out but wander further and deeper despite ourselves; the fear, the anger or the sadness preventing us returning. Sometimes we prefer to be lost and wandering, sometimes it's easier. Sometimes we find our own way out. But regardless, always, we are found.
Cecelia Ahern
Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.
Oscar Wilde
Why should I blame her that she filled my daysWith misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire?What could have made her peaceful with a mindThat nobleness made simple as a fire,With beauty like a tightened bow, a kindThat is not natural in an age like thisBeing high and solitary and most stern?Why, what could she have done, being what she is?Was there another Troy for her to burn?
W.B. Yeats
[Y]ou cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those and those even less so.
Samuel Beckett
He specialized in a particular kind of friendship with that eight-limbed, inscrutable, treacherous creature, the happily married coupe, adapting himself closely and lightly to the composite personality.A peevish dead woman...it's absurd...ho much less humiliating for them both it would have been if she had taken a lover.
Bowen Elizabeth
You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you do.
George Bernard Shaw
Places change imperceptibly – in detail, at least – a good deal,' said the Doctor, making an effort to keep up a conversation that plainly would not go on itself; 'and people too; population shifts – there's an old fellow, sir, they call Death.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man'sto keep unmarried as long as he can.
George Bernard Shaw
...if charity begins at home, empire begins in other men's homes.
Roger Casement
To love her was a liberal education.
Richard Steele
People will kill you. Over time. They will shave out every last morsel of fun in you with little, harmless sounding phrases that people uses every day, like: 'Be realis
Dylan Moran
What could he be thinking of? He seemed to be trying to remember something, perhaps an engagement, perhaps an excuse to leave her. For eventually, they all made some excuse.
Brian Moore