Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 6

Tanith frowned. Did people still go on DATES any more? She was sure they did. They probably called it something different though. She tried to think of the last date she'd been on. The last PROPER date. Did fighting side by side with Saracen Rue count as a date? They ended up snuggling under the moonlight, drenched in gore and pieces of brain - so it had PROBABLY been a date. If it wasn't, it was certainly a fun time had by all. Well, not ALL. But she and Saracen had sure had a blast.
Derek Landy
...Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.
John Boyne
It's all that the young can do for the old to shock them and keep them up to date.
George Bernard Shaw
When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money
Oscar Wilde
It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon.
Oscar Wilde
I'm sorry, 'herbal medicine', "Oh, herbal medicine's been around for thousands of years!" Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became 'medicine'. And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri, so knock yourselves out.
Dara Ó Briain
He is cured by faith who is sick of fate.
James Joyce
I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.
Oscar Wilde
No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.
Samuel Beckett
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
John Banville
Look at what you've done,' Sanguine said, shaking his head with mock severity. 'You have foiled out insidious little plot. You have emerged triumphant and victorious. Curse you, do-gooders. Curse you.
Derek Landy
All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
I don't suppose you would consider peaceful surrender?
Eoin Colfer
One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.
Oscar Wilde
I am almost dizzied by a sudden knowledge, as cold as snow down my spine; that I, too, will grow up one day like everyone else, and look back and miss the years gone by, and the things I could have done, should have done. And growing up is suddenly not something to be impatient for, not all jam and buns and doing as one pleases. It is precisely the opposite.
Paul Kearney
When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.
Oscar Wilde
Oft in the stilly night,Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,Fond memory brings the lightOf other days around me; The smiles, the tears, Of boyhood years,The words of love then spoken; The eyes that shown Now dimmed and gone,The cheerful hearts now broken.(from When the Splendor Falls by Laurie McBain)
Thomas Moore
The stories in books hate the stories contained in newspapers.
John Connolly
Music can change the world because it can change people.
Bono
If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows.
Niall Williams
The emptiness made her insides ache.
Anna McPartlin
Most people think it's normal to have a nameless sorrow at the bottom of your soul.
Diane Duane
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
Edmund Burke
Peace can be fragile and peace can be ugly and peace can be wrong. Peace built on lies is no peace at all.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
To be popular one must be a mediocrity.""Not with Women," said the duchess, shaking her head; "and women rule the world. I assure you we can't bear mediocrities. We women, as someone says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.""It seems to me that we never do anything else," murmered Dorian.
Oscar Wilde
poetry is not—except in a very limited sense—a form of self-expression. Who on earth supposes that the pearl expresses the oyster?
Cecil Day-Lewis
He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.
Edmund Burke
Borrowed thoughts like borrowed money only show the poverty of the borrower.
Lady Marguerite Blessington
My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
George Bernard Shaw
This is a bad story.”“Sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”“No, you should,” I say.“But—”“I don’t want there to be bad stories and me not know them.
Emma Donoghue
This is one of the problems with reality: the extent to which it resembles bad fiction.
Mark O'Connell
I'm not singing for the future I'm not dreaming of the past I'm not talking of the fist time I never think about the last
Shane MacGowan
All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment.
Oscar Wilde
The sound of the pages turning was the sound of magic. The dry liquid feel of paper under fingertips was what magic felt like.
Emma Donoghue
I quite enjoy the lines on my forehead because they show my life. That’s my history and I like to see that in other people. Like this wrinkle is due to some girl who broke my heart. I don’t want to escape it in any way.
Michael Fassbender
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
George Bernard Shaw
It would be unfair to expect other people to be as brilliant as oneself.
Oscar Wilde
What sort of funny songs?""My balls are swearing my balls are swearing I can't keep my balls from sweating ohhh no.""How is that funny?" I asked. "As in the balls of your feet?""No, it's like this thing..... Never mind," he said.
Anna Carey
We're going nowhere, " Joan said grimly. Traffic on the narrow street was at a complete standstill.A chill settled in Sophie's stomach: it was the appalling fear that her brother was going to die."Sidewalk," Nicholas said decisively. "Take it.""But the pedestrians—""Can get out of the way. Use your horn.
Michael Scott
To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
Oscar Wilde
Cold were the lips, yet he kissed them. Salt was the honey of the hair, yet he tasted it with a bitter joy. He kissed the closed eyelids, and the wild spray that lay upon their cups was less salt than his tears. And to the dead thing he made confession. Into the shells of its ears he poured the harsh wine of his tale. He put the little hands round his neck, and with his fingers he touched the thin reed of the throat. Bitter, bitter was his joy, and full of strange gladness was his pain.
Oscar Wilde
And how delightful other people's emotions were!-much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him. One's own soul, and the passions of one's friends-those were the fascinating things in life.
Oscar Wilde
Like, okay. Everyone in history thought they were the ones who finally knew everything. In their naissance, right, they were positive they knew exactly how the universe worked. Til the next set of guys came along and proved they were missing like a hundred important things. and then that set of guys were sure they had it all down, til another set came along and showed them parts they were missing." He glances at Julia, checking if she's laughing at him, which she isn't, and if she's listening, which she is, completely. "So." he says, "it's pretty unlikely, mathematically, that we are living in the one single era that has everything figured out. Which means there's a decent possibility that the reason we can't explain how ghosts and stuff could exist is because we haven't figured it out yet, not because they don't. And it is pretty arrogant of us to think it definitely has to be the other way around.
Tana French
You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.
Oscar Wilde
Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.
Oscar Wilde
Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;Remember the wisdom out of the old days:*Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,And the winds that blow through the starry ways,Let the starry winds and the flame and the floodCover over and hide, for he has no partWith the lonely, majestical multitude*.
W.B. Yeats
Shall the dire day break when lifefinds us merely husband and wifewith passion not so much deniedas neatly laundered and put asideand the old joyous insistencetrimmed to placid coexistence?Shall we sometime arise from bedwith not a carnal thought in our headlook at each other without surpriseout of wide awake uncandid eyestouch and know no immediate urgewhere all mysteries converge?Speak for the sake of something to sayand now and then put on a displayof elaborate mimicry of the past to provethat ritual reigns where once ruled loveand calmly observe those bleak ritesthat once made splendour of our nights?Dear, when we stop being outrageousand no longer find contagiousthe innumerable ecstasies we findin rise of hand or leap of mind - not now or then, love, need we fear
Christy Brown
Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.
Bram Stoker
Come away, O human child!To the waters and the wildWith a faery, hand in hand,For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
W.B. Yeats
Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well.Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta.Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.
Oscar Wilde
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild' is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels.
George Bernard Shaw
He asked me, "what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another?" I answered "they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in a war, in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire: what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or gray: and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, especially if it be in things indifferent.
Jonathan Swift
So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
Iris Murdoch
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
George Bernard Shaw
Revenge is what I want. Nothing but pure unadulterated revenge. But my mother brought me up to be a lady.
J.P. Donleavy
The shovel worked in and out of the light beams as the dirt hit him in the stomach, on his back, fell into his ears, his eyes, as I covered him along with the things that had made him: his walks, his rest, his eating when hungry, the stars he watched sometimes, the first day I brought him home, the first time he saw snow, and every second of his friendship, what he took with him into silence and stillness ...
Gerard Donovan
But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.
Oscar Wilde
The hands of fate keep time on a heart-shaped clock.
Darren Shan
An optimist is a braver cynic.
Colum McCann
Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.
Oscar Wilde