Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 60

That's another sort of being haunted: starting something and never finishing it.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
Oscar Wilde
Freedom is your soul in the emptiness of night. Freedom is this dark that is as great as what it holds the stars and everything beneath it and yet how it seems to be nothing, has no beginning, no end, and no center.
Paul Lynch
I dream of things I know nothing about.
Louise O'Neill
We can only learn to love by loving.
Iris Murdoch
Honesty, vulnerability and a good amount of courageous faith allows you to cry out in your bewilderment and not lose your belief in the process. These things allow you to wrestle your faith rather than lose it.
Bono
Sometimes not much is just enough.
John O'Callaghan
The precautions of nervous people re infectious, and persons of a like temperament are pretty sure, after a time, to imitate them.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Embrace death, dance with it a while, and finally fall prey to it.
Darren Shan
Some things is easy do, when you have no choice in the world but to do them. Like shiteing into bedpan, in front of a nurse.
Donal Ryan
And it was the din of all these hollow-sounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms. He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades.
James Joyce
I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.
James Joyce
Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is.
Oscar Wilde
It was winter, and a night of bitter cold. The snow lay thick upon the ground, and upon the branches of the trees: the frost kept snapping the little twigs on either side of them, as they passed: and when they came to the Mountain-Torrent she was hanging motionless in air, for the Ice-King had kissed her.
Oscar Wilde
Then I realised that I was the god on this occasion. I had tried to help the bluebottle, but it wouldn't let me. And then I felt sorry for God because I understood his frustration. Sometimes when people offer a helping hand, it gets pushed away. People always want to help themselves first.
Cecelia Ahern
I always wonder why condescending snarkiness is the chosen method of communication for so many forum users. It seems to me like these things would be much better expressed in non-confrontational, polite manner.
Gavin Dunne
Holly's theory about the army," Sharon explained.And what is it?" Denise asked, intrigued.Oh, that fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.
Cecelia Ahern
I read somewhere once that getting lost is the best way to find yourself.
Joanne Clancy
There are no short cuts to Heaven only the ordinary way of ordinary things.
Vincent McNabb
Money can't buy friends but you can get a better class of enemy.
Spike Milligan
You can’t demand peace, but you can reduce the reasons for war.
Colin R. Turner
The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.
Oscar Wilde
As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
Oscar Wilde
One day at a time, sweet Jesus. Whoever wrote that one hadn’t a clue. A day is a fuckin’ eternity
Roddy Doyle
Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.
Iris Murdoch
Man wants but little here below nor wants that little long.
Oliver Goldsmith
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
J.P. Donleavy
And I told him that I believed in God because I had seen His opposite. I had seen all that He was not, and been touched by it, and so I could no more deny the possibility of an ultimate goodness to set against such depravity than I could deny that daylight followed darkness, and night the day.
John Connolly
Survival was an unpleasent thing to witness.
Marian Keyes
I think: by the time I'm old, nobody will be able to die any more.
Sara Baume
Walpurgis Night, when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad - when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was, alone - unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me! It took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright.(Dracula's Guest)
Bram Stoker
Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.
Oscar Wilde
In love everything changes, and continues changing all the time. There is no stillness, no stopped clock of the heart in which the moment of happiness holds forever, but only the constant whirring forward motion of desire and need, rising and falling, falling and rising, full of doubts then certainties that moment by moment change and become doubts again.
Niall Williams
A great devotee of the gospel of getting on.
George Bernard Shaw
I didn't say any of this to my sister. How I saw her being broken into mediocrity and motherhood; her body broken and then her mind - or did her mind go first, it's sort of hard to disentangle - and then for her to turn around and say Broken is Best, I didn't say how that made me furious beyond measure.
Anne Enright
He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.
James Joyce
Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything.
Samuel Beckett
Before forty, you think that exhaustion is something like a long-lasting hangover. But at forty you learn all about it. Even your passions exhaust you.
Kevin Barry
E: Well, shall we go?V: Yes, let's go.(They do not move)
Samuel Beckett
Since when has love ever looked for reasons, or evidence? Why would love bow to the reality of things, when it creates a reality of its own, so much more vivid, wherein everything resonates to the key of the heart?
Paul Murray
Valkyrie stood there and waited for her to start making sense."There is a vegetable-plant hybrid we've been working on, modifying the genes and receptors, mutating the proteins and acids so that they are, in effect, neurotransmitters. Our work on the synapses alone has been quite illuminating."Valkyrie stood there and waited for her to start making sense.
Derek Landy
You can't dance to paintings. This is something Ben said, during one of our White Cube conversations, back when I was still wrong about him. He said it even though, at the time, he was desperately trying to be a painter. He said it because it was true and not because it was something either of us wanted to hear.
Sara Baume
The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.
John Connolly
Art, like Nature, has her monsters
Oscar Wilde
(True,) the white hole said. (My name is Khairelikoblepharehglukumeilichephreidosd'enagouni-) and at the same time he went flickering through a pattern of colors that was evidently the visual translation.
Diane Duane
Marriage is very important. Marrying a girl is the most important thing a man can do. Never mind business or politics or sport or any of that, there's nothing so vital to the world as a man marrying a woman. That's where we get our children from, that's how the human race goes forward. And if it's too late for children, there's the companionship of a safe and trusted person.
Frank Delaney
What we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.
George Bernard Shaw
I was going straight for Mantis, but then that bloody gas got in my eyes and, I don't know, some massive bloke reared up in front of me. I hit him, but I swear, it was like hiting a wall."Gracious nodded. "You hit a wall."Maybury blinked at him. "I what?""I saw it. You ran into a cloud of gas and stumbled around for a second until you reached a wall, and then you shrieked and punched it. It was very heroic.
Derek Landy
There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.
Bram Stoker
Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.
Oscar Wilde
By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.
Oscar Wilde
They are all innocent until proven guilty. But not me. I am a liar until I am proven honest.
Louise O'Neill
I mean you ACRES of harm,' Dalrymple growled. 'Untold QUANTITIES of harm. I will visit a whole CONTINENT of harm upon you before we are through.
Derek Landy
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRODI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.
James Joyce
She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.
Oscar Wilde
Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement - as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements. Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary...
Brian Friel
Destiny's what you make of it. You have to face whatever life throws at you.
Darren Shan
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
George Bernard Shaw
We should all realize that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls
Frank Wynne
One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
George Bernard Shaw