Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 58

The harp that once through Tara's halls The soul of music shed Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls As if that soul were fled.
George Moore
To influence a person is to give him one's own soul.
Oscar Wilde
Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
John Banville
The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.
Colum McCann
Ruby: ...What's so good about being 20? I call them the materialist years. The years we get distracted by all the bullshit. Then we cop on when we hit our 30s and spend those years trying to make up for the 20s. But your 40s? Those years are for enjoying it.Rosie: Hmmm good point. What are the 50s for?Ruby: Fixing what you fucked up in your 40s.Rosie: Great. Looking forward to it.
Cecelia Ahern
CLOV:Do you believe in the life to come?HAMM:Mine was always that.
Samuel Beckett
I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin
Frank McCourt
I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true? That's a fact.
James Joyce
Where are you going?""Nowhere special. I just have some... things to do.""Why did you pause?'"I'm sorry?""You paused. You have 'some... things to do.'"No reason, I just--""You're up to something.""No--""Then why'd you pause?""Get in the car."She got in. He got in."Seat belt," he said.Why'd you pause?"His head drooped. "Because I'm up to somthing.""And why can't I come with you?""Because it's something sneaky.""Do you promise to tell me later?""I do.""Well all right then." She clicked her seat belt into place. "Let's go.
Derek Landy
All government - indeed every human benefit and enjoyment every virtue and every prudent act - is founded on compromise and barter.
Edmund Burke
It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new - again more by accident than design.
Michael Foley
Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was non ov those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.
Colum McCann
Everybody's damaged by something.
Emma Donoghue
I have been so long masterthat I would be master still, or at least that none othershould be master of me.
Bram Stoker
Evolution is a theory with more holes than a Dutch dam of swiss cheese.
Eoin Colfer
I did not matter what distant iron city had raised him. He had been made by Sorry-in-the-Vale, his bones as much a part of it as the valley and the woods. It was as if she had the whole town spread underneath her. Or the whole world, since right then he was the only part of it that mattered.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde
Maybe love is thinking that every time your partner does or says something mundane that you want to start a Mexican wave from here to Uzbekistan in utter delight.
Cecelia Ahern
I have cried even when the laugh did choke me. But no more think that I am all sorry when I cry, for the laugh he come just the same. Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, ‘May I come in?’ is not true laughter. No! He is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person, he choose no time of suitability. He say, ‘I am here.
Bram Stoker
You thought I was a werewolf?" Dervish asks."Yes" I answer hollowly."You ass.
Darren Shan
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.
Michael Scott
... even one centimetre can make an awful lot of difference when you don't have many to spare.
Eoin Colfer
Pain's nothing. Pains what you give, not what you get.
Colum McCann
The problem with communication…is the illusion that is has been accomplished.
George Bernard Shaw
When something has been perfect there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it.
Edna O'Brien
There is beauty everywhere; even in the dark, there is light, and that is the rarest kind of all.
Catherine Doyle
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
Oscar Wilde
A soldier is an anachronism of which we must get rid.
George Bernard Shaw
There's no love as real as that of a girl and her best friend.
Catherine Doyle
How can she? She's incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?
George Bernard Shaw
The possible is just the impossible that we've come to accept,
Stewart Stafford
There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and the whereabouts of these exhalations... So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.
Iris Murdoch
Alan: "I had terrible stage fright."Sin: "I'm not familiar with the concept of 'stage fright.'"A: "It's pretty awful. You end up having to picture the entire audience in their underwear. Phyllis was in that audience, you know."S: "Why, Alan, I had no idea your tastes ran that way."A: "Phyllis is a very nice lady. And I do not consider her so much aged as matured, like a fine wine. But I still think you owe me an archery lesson.
Sarah Rees Brennan
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.
Oscar Wilde
I am only a beer teetotaller not a champagne teetotaller.
George Bernard Shaw
…life is as fragile as a butterfly win and we must carry it lightly. Sometimes it will sit happily in our hands, sometimes it will fly away from us, but in the end---no matter the distance or the complications in between---the things we truly care for will always come back to us.
Hazel Gaynor
Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.
Oscar Wilde
She had worried she would break if her heart broke, but she wasn't broken. She had lost everything, but she was not lost. It seemed a worthwhile thing to know.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Nichts Interessantes ist jemals richtig.
Oscar Wilde
An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.
George Bernard Shaw
I have nothing to declare except my genius.
Oscar Wilde
It is a kind of geisha containment, a shutteredness, a withdrawal and negation. It's as if she is capable of sensing when people are on the point of knowing who she is and she sends them a subliminal denial.
Deirdre Madden
She got a sense that their time together was valuable, as though she needed to hold on to every minute as if it were their last. He was too good to be true, every moment spent with him magical, so much so that she presumed this couldn’t last forever. None of her good feelings had lasted forever, none of the people who lightened her life managed to stay. Going by her previous luck, from pure fear of not wanting to lose something so special, she was just waiting for the day he would leave. Whoever he was, he was healing her, he was teaching her to smile, teaching her to laugh, and she wondered what she could teach him.
Cecelia Ahern
Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.
George Bernard Shaw
And the view was suddenly clear to me. The world opened out to its grim beyonds and I realized that, at forty, one must learn the rigors of acceptance. Capitalize it: Acceptance. I needed to accept what was put before me--be it a watery grave in Ireland's only natural fjord, or a return to the city and its grayer intensities, or a wordless exile in some steaming Cambodian swamp hole, or poems or no poems, or children or not, lovers or not, illness or otherwise, success or its absence. I would accept all that was put in my way, from here on through until I breathed my last.
Kevin Barry
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.
Oscar Wilde
When a guy says,'I'll call you,' and he doesn't say when-that means he won't call you." Kit pulled his phone out of his pocket and pressed a couple buttons. My phone vibrated in my pocket. I fished it out, smiling. "Madness," Kit whispered softly into his phone. "I meant I'd call you. This is me calling you.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman
Oscar Wilde
I loved him, you know,' she said. 'I would have loved him as hard as he'd let me, for the rest of my life.
Tana French
ISIS and these kinds of extremists are a death cult. We’re a life cult. Rock ’n’ roll is a life force, and it’s joy as an act of defiance.
Bono
This is what they mean by epiphanies. I am almost thinking in exclamation points.
Claire Hennessy
For what is truth? In matters of relogion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one's last mood.
Oscar Wilde
She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.
Colum McCann
A mug's game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so.
Samuel Beckett
Well, what do they all amount to, these kings and captains and bishops and lawyers and such like? They just leave you in the ditch to bleed to death; and the next thing is, you meet them down there, for all the airs they give themselves.
George Bernard Shaw
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
Oscar Wilde
As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests' worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development was laid on the wasteland of Midtown West like slabs of gold bullion.
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
I try to focus, but I can't. I know why I'm here, and then I don't know why I'm here. I understand, then I don't. I think it's fair, and then I don't. I wish I'd never done what I'd done, and then I'm glad I did.
Cecelia Ahern
What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.
George Bernard Shaw
Don't you ever think,' he asked cautiously, 'that it would be better to be a bully than to be bullied? At least that way no one could ever hurt you.' Katarina turned to him in amazement. 'No,' she said definitively, shaking her head. 'No Pieter, I never think that, not for a moment.
John Boyne