Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 64

In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.Also everywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the things all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.
Emma Donoghue
I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
Oscar Wilde
He watch'd and wept he pray'd and felt for all.
Oliver Goldsmith
Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.
Oscar Wilde
He'd solved the problem you see—and that's the way some people are. They are ceaselessly finding ways of getting to grips with the world, of surmounting certain antipathies so as to apply themselves to it that little bit more. It's quite admirable really, how they refuse to let anything come between them and the rest of it—Oh, the rest of it! Sort of there, sort of hovering there all the time. Different ideas come to me now and again—strategies I suppose that might inculcate a little more compatibility. I just don't know if I'll ever get the hang of it if you want to know—as a matter of fact I think I've left it a little too late to cultivate the necessary outlook.
Claire-Louise Bennett
(On his gravestone): "I told you I was ill".
Spike Milligan
But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.
Sara Baume
Earning money from, and supporting, a system that keeps these people in poverty in the first place and then gives them some of the profits in the form of "strings-attached" aid or World Bank and IMF loans is no more ridiculous than Shell or Esso giving Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth £10,000 to help clear up the destruction that they inevitably cause. Would it not be better not to cause the destruction in the first place?
Mark Boyle
Harper, treat your words with careFor they may cause joy or despairSing your songs of health and loveOf dragons flaming from above
Anne McCaffrey
Any writer who puts his words and thoughts out into the public is going to be criticized.
Thomas Moore
I can walk... see."I made my legs walk."What are you doing?""Vertical walkin'."Alec laughed. "Pitch Perfect?""Amazin' film.
L.A. Casey
Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?
James Joyce
Marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree.
Oscar Wilde
Writing is turning life's worst moments into money.
J.P. Donleavy
I like places like this," he announced.I like old places too," Josh said, "but what's to like about a place like this?"The king spread his arms wide. "What do you see?"Josh made a face. "Junk. Rusted tractor, broken plow, old bike."Ahh...but I see a tractor that was once used to till these fields. I see the plow it once pulled. I see a bicycle carefully placed out of harm's way under a table."Josh slowly turned again, looking at the items once more.And i see these things and I wonder at the life of the person who carefully stored the precious tractor and plow in the barn out of the weather, and placed their bike under a homemade table."Why do you wonder?" Josh asked. "Why is it even important?"Because someone has to remember," Gilgamesh snapped, suddenly irritated. "Some one has to remember the human who rode the bike and drove the tractor, the person who tilled the fields, who was born and lived and died, who loved and laughed and cried, the person who shivered in the cold and sweated in the sun." He walked around the barn again, touching each item, until his palm were red with rust." It is only when no one remembers, that you are truely lost. That is the true death.
Michael Scott
He said you have to be on the side of the losers, the people with bad lungs. You have to be with those who are homesick and can't breathe very well in Ireland. He said it makes no sense to hold a stone in your hand. A lot more people would be homeless if you speak the killer language. He said Ireland has more than one story. We are the German-Irish story. We are the English-Irish story, too. My father has one soft foot and one hard foot, one good ear and one bad ear, and we have one Irish foot and one German foot and a right arm in English. We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German raisins. We are the brack people and we don't have just one language and one history. We sleep in German and we dream in Irish. We laugh in Irish and we cry in German. We are silent in German and we speak in English. We are the speckled people.
Hugo Hamilton
A cat is only technically an animal, being divine.
Robert Lynd
Fight only in direst needNot for lust or petty greedHonor those that do give birthRespect them well for their full worth
Anne McCaffrey
If I had to get there without friends, I could do it. Had been doing it. I'd never met anyone who brought me somewhere I wanted to stay, looked at me and saw someone I wanted to be for good; anyone who was worth giving up the more I wanted down the line.
Tana French
The Irish way of telling a story is a complex and elaborate one, complete with wild exaggerations, a certain delight in improbable fantasy, and a heightened sense of drama.
Rashers Tierney
LADY BRACKNELLTo speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.
Oscar Wilde
In the summers we swam in the river and caught minnows with jam pots; on Sunday evenings my father fished in it, bringing home each time a bag of trout. In winter salmon came up to this quiet backwater to spawn and, of course, there was a certain amount of poaching, to which my father objected strongly. Once, when a generous neighbour gave us a present of a poached salmon, he lined us all up around the kitchen table and proceeded to open up the fish. As the eggs poured out he explained about the huge loss of fish life due to the poaching of this one salmon. In my father's world nature possessed a balance and man had no right to upset that balance to satisfy his own greed; killing this fish was going against the laws of nature.
Alice Taylor
I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.
Oscar Wilde
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
Oscar Wilde
If mankind's destined to bite the bullet, let's bite it and be damned.
Darren Shan
Well-known, alas, is the case of the poor German who was very fond of three and who made each aspect of his life a thing of triads. He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.
Flann O'Brien
My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.
Oscar Wilde
I guess love laughs at history a little.
Sebastian Barry
Having one eye makes you see the world in unusual ways, Shockwave..." -Overlord
Nick Roche
An cinniúnt, is dócha: féach an féileacán úd thall atá ag foluain os cionn mo choinnle. Ní fada go loiscfear a sciatháin mhaiseacha: cá bhfios dúinne nach bhfuil a fhios sin aige, freisin?
Pádraic Ó Conaire
Jo claimed that the reason people survived breakups was that within days of the amputation, Mother Nature started reminding you of what you had been doing without, what could have been better, all the samll discontents you had been filing away.
Emma Donoghue
I’ve long believed that the gods give us the music we’re supposed to hear at the times we’re supposed to hear it, because all music, even lyrical and regardless of language performed in, is in and of itself an inherently magical language that can, at proper times, speak to the soul.
Ruadhán J. McElroy
Money can't buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.
Spike Milligan
Night descended on Roarhaven like a woolly blanket of blackness with holes in it that were the stars.
Derek Landy
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
Oscar Wilde
Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.
Oscar Wilde
Faith is blind belief. Atheism is blind disbelief. No one has all the information needed to take up such fixed positions.
Stewart Stafford
I couldn’t be with people and I didn’t want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me—I’d lost my place in the universe. It had closed up and there was nowhere for me to be. I was more lost than I had known it was possible for any human being to be.
Marian Keyes
Maybe the Buddha was right: pain and suffering are the only true constants in life.
Dermot Davis
He wants to enslave you.''I shudder at the thought of being free.
Oscar Wilde
Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places.
James Joyce
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 realistic!'" (2009)]
Dylan Moran
Relationship gurus always said that an attraction based on friendship and mutual respect was far more likely to stay the course - and the bastards were right.
Marian Keyes
You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.
George Bernard Shaw
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Oscar Wilde
To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
Oscar Wilde
That's ridiculous. The only point in having enemies is so you can defeat them, kill them, brush them aside.""Or give them a chance to redeem themselves.
Derek Landy
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke
Darkness crept through. Shadows pried at doors, teased dull edges of recollections that never quite took hold. Memories that would have shriveled under the blinding sun of daylight. And reason.
Edward Fahey
Regrets, Blacksmith, make poor currency. You can't but back with them what you most desire.
John Connolly
I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five
Oscar Wilde
It is much easier to believe lies than the truth." "Why?" asked Janna. "Because lies are manufactured to satisfy the emotions. A mother would rather believe her pretty girl lazy than accept the fact that she's a dumb cluck. Germans would rather believe they were stabbed in the back than that they lost a fair fight. And anyone would rather blame someone else for his misfortunes. The truth is hard. Don't fool with it unless you realize that.
Hilda van Stockum
Do you know what the difference is between Friendship and Love? Friendship is the photograph, Love is the oil painting.
Frank Delaney
Disappointment is the nurse of wisdom.
Sir Boyle Roche
How are we going to get out of here?""Oh, escape is easy once you have the right
Derek Landy
He'd once known a man who said that life hinged on the moment, that everything changed in the blink of an eye. Tesseract knew the truth of that as well as anybody. It was in those moments that he struck, after all, snatching people's lives away. He'd always known that it was only a matter of time before one of those moment's worked against him.
Derek Landy
The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
Oscar Wilde
Not really a party until someone brings the surprise zombies.
Sarah Rees Brennan
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Oscar Wilde
At first we had so much to catch up on we were talking a hundred words a second, barely even listening to the ends of one another's sentences before moving onto the next. And there was laughing. Lots of laughing. Then the laughing stopped and there was this silence. What the hell was it?It was like the world stopped turning in that instant. Like everyone around us had disappeared. Like everything at home was forgotten about. It was as if those few minutes on this world were created just for us and all we could do was look at each other. It was like he was seeing my face for the first time. He looked confused but kind of amused. Exactly how I felt. Because I was sitting on the grass with my best friend Alex, and that was my best friend Alex's face and nose and eyes and lips, but they seemed different. So I kissed him. I seized the moment and I kissed him,
Cecelia Ahern