Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 56

I think that we all drown, in one way or another.
Moïra Fowley-Doyle
Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands.
Oscar Wilde
The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
Oscar Wilde
That somehow dreams are a blurred line between here and there, like a meeting room in a prison. You’re both in the same room, yet on different sides and really, in different worlds.
Cecelia Ahern
LADY BRACKNELLI had some crumpets with Lady Harbury, who seems to me to be living entirely for pleasure now.ALGERNONI hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief.
Oscar Wilde
Mary,' said her mother. 'We don't like sarcasm ' 'You mightn't like it,' said Mary. 'But I love it.
Roddy Doyle
These reasonings will furnish us with an adequate definition of a true critic: that he is a discoverer and collector of writers’ faults. Which may be farther put beyond dispute by the following demonstration: that whoever will examine the writings in all kinds, wherewith this ancient sect has honoured the world, shall immediately find, from the whole thread and tenor of them, that the ideas of the authors have been altogether conversant and taken up with the faults and blemishes, and oversights, and mistakes of other writers; and let the subject treated on be whatever it will, their imaginations are so entirely possessed and replete with the defects of other pens, that the very quintessence of what is bad does of necessity distil into their own, by which means the whole appears to be nothing else but an abstract of the criticisms themselves have made.
Jonathan Swift
History is a pact between the dead the living and the yet unborn.
Edmund Burke
Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world but you must get at a man through his own religion not through yours.
George Bernard Shaw
The ecstatic vision and social program sought to rebuild a society upward from its grass roots but on principles of religious and economic egalitarianism, with free healing brought directly to the peasant homes and free sharing of whatever they had in return. The deliberate conjunction of magic and meal, miracle and table, free compassion and open commensality, was a challenge launched not just at Judaism’s strictest purity regulations, or even at the Mediterranean’s patriarchal combination of honor and shame, patronage and clientage, but at civilization’s eternal inclination to draw lines, invoke boundaries, establish hierarchies, and maintain discriminations.
John Dominic Crossan
A day's work is a day's work neither more nor less and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance a night's repose and due leisure whether he be painter or ploughman.
George Bernard Shaw
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
Samuel Beckett
Humanity, let us say, is like people packed in an automobile which is traveling downhill without lights at terrific speed and driven by a four-year-old child. The signposts along the way are all marked 'Progress.
Lord Dunsany
It was as dark as the inside of a cabinet minister.
Joyce Cary
He’d never heard of a demon with freckles before.
Michael Scott
I don't think he likes girls", I said. "Or boys. Look at the horror on his face. He doesn't look like a people person.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Believe me, when you die, it's everybody else's but your problem
Cecelia Ahern
Man wasn't made to share the universe with gods.
Darren Shan
Always she had sounded sympathetic, always she had appeared to understand. But inside there was a bit of her that said that they couldn't have tried hard enough. If Celia had a daughter who was desperately unhappy at school and who had lost four stone in weight, she wouldn't hang around --she'd try to cope with it. If she had a father who couldn't cope she'd have him to live with her. Only now was she beginning to realize that it was not to be so simple. People had minds of their own. And her mother's mind was like a hermetically sealed box in a vault of a bank.
Maeve Binchy
I wish Adam had died with all his ribs in his body.
Dion Boucicault
Their ghosts are gagged, their books are library flotsam,Some of their names - not all - we learnt in schoolBut, life being short, we rarely read their poems,Mere source-books now to point or except a rule,While those opinions which rank them high are basedOn a wish to be different or on lack of taste.
Louis MacNeice
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.
W.B. Yeats
Hurt is a part of life. To be honest, I think hurt is a part of happiness, that our definition of happiness has gotten very narrow lately, very nervous, a little afraid of this brawling, fabulous, unpredictable world.
Julian Gough
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
Oscar Wilde
A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can you want?
Oscar Wilde
Most sorts of diversion in men children and other animals are in imitation of fighting.
Jonathan Swift
I pulled back and stared up into his eyes. "You're gettin' very deep on me."Alec's hands gripped my behind. "I'll be getting very deep in you if you keep looking at me like that
L.A. Casey
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
Oscar Wilde
Old, is it?" the man asks."Yes, very.""Pre-war, is it?""Yes," I say. "If by war you mean the Norman invasion.
Garrett Carr
Poetry Saved Me
Bev Flynn
Pain and pleasure like light and darkness succeed each other.
Laurence Sterne
What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do.
George Bernard Shaw
Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.
Samuel Beckett
He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.
James Joyce
Policemen always call me a stupid bitch, and I deny that I'm stupid.
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
preserve my sanity, for to this I am reduced. Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past. Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for, that I may not go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already. If I be sane, then surely it is maddening to think that of all the foul things that lurk in this hateful place.
Bram Stoker
‎"Sarge, mr. Nurd here is threatening to turn me to jelly.""really?" said Sarge. "what flavor?
John Connolly
Story!" The dwarf snorted. "You'll be talking about "happily ever after" next. Do we look happy? There's no happily ever after for us. Miserabily ever after, more like.
John Connolly
Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself.
John O'Donohue
The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.
James Joyce
Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.
Tana French
The words ran away with me.
Edna O'Brien
Mrs. P.? Oh no. She’s the help. Bosnian, you know. Or is it Serbian? An absolute treasure, anyway. As I always say to Bel, if there’s one good thing to come out of all this fuss in the Balkans, it’s the availability of quality staff . . .” The words died away on my lips: once again I found myself trailing off in the stare of those unblinking eyes. This fellow was like some kind of after-dinner black hole. My anxiety began to mount again.
Paul Murray
Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves and fibers and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.
Oscar Wilde
The nature of compassion isn't coming to terms with your own suffering and applying it to others: It's knowing that other folks around you suffer and, no matter what happens to you, no matter how lucky or unlucky you are, they keep suffering. And if you can do something about that, then you do it, and you do it without whining or waving your own fuckin' cross for the world to see. You do it because it's the right thing to do.
John Connolly
If good men pretend to be villains, how is anybody supposed to know the difference between them?
Sarah Rees Brennan
And be thinking, remembering. Trying to. All difficult dark stuff, stories stuffed away, like old socks into old pillowcases. Not quite knowing the weight of truth in them much more. And things that I have let be a long time in the interests of happiness, or at least that daily contentment that I was once I do believe mistress of
Sebastian Barry
And you’ll miss me more as the narrowing weeks wing by. Someday duly, oneday truly, twosday newly, till whensday.
James Joyce
In all your life, only a few moments matter. Mostly you never get a good look at them except in hindsight, long after they've zipped past you: the moment when you decided whether to talk to that girl, slow down on that blind bend, stop and find that condom. I was lucky, I guess you could call it. I got to see one of mine face-to-face, and recognize it for what it was.
Tana French
I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.
Iris Murdoch
Oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.
James Joyce
I keep being told that my writing is getting better and better. - Now, at first I am thrilled by that, but then I think, Isn't everybody's? Do some authors grow cozy with their own style, and stay there?I think of writing fiction as an art form. As such, it's a constant exploration of new and developing ideas. If any of my books were much like my others, I don't think I'd even bother to write them.
Edward Fahey
Life has always poppies in her hands.
Oscar Wilde
I learned the strange art of loneliness, the weathered yearning that swells and passes, and swells and passes, when you walk a trail alone.
Anna Carey
Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his /pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs/, --- and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own.But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure, --- no, nor from the law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinions.
Edmund Burke
That kind of friendship doesn't just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.
Tana French
However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise.
Michael Foley
In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free.
Oscar Wilde
Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard Some do it with a bitter look Some with a flattering word The coward does it with a kiss The brave man with a sword.
Oscar Wilde