Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 65

My friends I tell you this, we are a jolly group but put us in uniform and all that change. In war I don’t know who my brother. In war I don’t know who my friend. War make everybody savage. Who can say what lies inside the heart of each one of us when everything is taken away.
Edna O'Brien
They walked to school, talking about how much they were longing for the summer holidays."Oh, I am planning things," said Jamie. "Great, great things. I could join a band.""You gave up the guitar after two lessons.""Well," he said, "I could be a backup dancer.""Backup dancers have to wear belly shirts and glitter," said Mae. "So obviously, I support this plan.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.
Oscar Wilde
The truth a fairly important thing to hold on to when you’ve been pulled out of the sea after wanting to drown in it. I could’ve let the sea take me. I could easily be dead now, which is funny when you think of it. When I say funny, what I actually mean is weird and kind of disturbing.When there’s the loud sound of a siren screaming in your head it doesn’t take too long before a feeling of not caring what happens washed over you and you become recklessly self- destructive. I used to be full of energy and happiness but I could barely remember those kinds of feelings. The cheerful, childish things I used to think had been replaced. A whole load of new realisations had begun to grow inside me like tangled weeds, and they were starting to kill me. That’s why I’d make the decision that involved heading ogg to the pier on my pike in the middle of the night and cycling off it.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use— silence, exile, and cunning.
James Joyce
I was out of sorts. They are deep, my sorts, a deep ditch, and I am not often out of them.
Samuel Beckett
In tombs of gold and lapis lazuliBodies of holy men and women exudeMiraculous oil, odour of violet.But under heavy loads of trampled clayLie bodies of the vampires full of blood;Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet("Oil and Blood")
W.B. Yeats
After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.
Sebastian Barry
It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.
Sara Baume
Euthanasia" is an excellent and comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it.
Bram Stoker
A child can learn what is right as easy as what is wrong and whatever impressions are made on the mind when it is plastic will remain there.
Joseph Devlin
I know Sir John will go though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs.
Jonathan Swift
Science Fiction is a safe, fertile arena in which to rehearse the potential scientific facts of tomorrow
Stewart Stafford
There really isn't much wrong with me,' I say, 'it's just that, well, I'm not like other people; I don't want the things they want. And this is not right, I mean, in other people's eyes, and I feel as though they feel they are duty-bound to normalise me, that it isn't okay just to not want the things they want, you know?
Sara Baume
The most painful moment in my life also became the moment I showed the most strength and courage.
Cecelia Ahern
No good deed goes unpunished.
Oscar Wilde
I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.
Oscar Wilde
People will kill you over time. And how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases like ‘be realistic’.
Dylan Moran
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
Oscar Wilde
When the world has once begun to use us ill and afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony as men do to a whore.
Jonathan Swift
Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
Oscar Wilde
It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in suchan inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, theirabsolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lackof style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give usan impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements ofbeauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, thewhole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenlywe find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of theplay. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonderof the spectacle enthralls us.
Oscar Wilde
His abhorrence and fear of alcohol did not extend to his power as host. He kept a huge cupboard of drinks in the station house and loved to serve large measures to visiting relatives--especially those he disliked--about which there was a definite element of spreading bait for garden snails.
John McGahern
Religion converts despair which destroys into resignation which submits.
Lady Blessington
There's a difference between living and just surviving. Do something you love, and find someone to love who loves that you love what you do.It is really that simple.And that hard.
John Connolly
With a few notable exceptions, state and local government officials had completely failed to do their jobs. Official incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, neglect, and the desire to protect abortion from a harsh spotlight whatever the cost caused needless deaths and injuries. The grand jury's conclusion was damning: Kermit Gosnell murdered and maimed with impunity for thirty years because virtually no one did his job properly.
Ann McElhinney
A demon obsessed with being human is a demon no longer
John Connolly
His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her. What once was life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose.
Colm Tóibín
In this way, I was able to place my own concerns aside and curl myself up in the cocoon of somebody else's imagination. My life was suspended - I was in neither one place nor the other.
Kate Kerrigan
How you spend your time is more important than how you spend your money. Money mistakes can be corrected, but time is gone forever.
David Norris
I guess when you’re trying to find all the parts of yourself, it’s difficult to be with someone who’s already fully intact.
Cecelia Ahern
Y’know, it’s not that we need equality. Because everyone’s already equal, it’s just that a ton of idiots lost the memo. Indeed, everyone just needs to be TREATED like the equal they already are.
Ellie Rose McKee
To get into the best society nowadays one has either to feed people amuse people or shock people.
Oscar Wilde
I love you.''Yeah, well...''You make my heart want to beat.''That's nice and creepy. But I'm with Fletcher.(...) Also, these proclamations of your undying love for me are getting kind of... it's a bit much to be honest. Just hold back a little.''But my love for you is eternal.''That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Derek Landy
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
Oscar Wilde
A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.
Oscar Wilde
Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.""I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.
Oscar Wilde
One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.
Elizabeth Bowen
What's seldom is wonderful.
John Connolly
Loyalty in a critic is corruption.
George Bernard Shaw
All I had was a dream and six million pounds.'Denholm, The IT Crowd
G. Linehan
Blending into the tinctures and textures of the countryside. The tree which falls without any human hearing still falls, as the creatures who die without being found by a human still die.
Sara Baume
If you see an injustice, and don’t move to right it when you have a chance, history won’t forget that, either.
Diane Duane
Crazy people love their Kindles.
Dermot Davis
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
Iris Murdoch
If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses.
George Bernard Shaw
To heal would be to open the wound,examine it and forgive
Maeve Binchy
When the world has once begun to use us ill, it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore.
Jonathan Swift
I moved silently across the garden, silvered with moonlight, my feet barely touching the ground. I brushed past fern and tree, following the lights across the stream, toward the cottage in the clearing where I watched a little girl surrounded by light and laughter as the fairies threaded flowers through her hair. I stood out of sight, peering through the tangled blackberry bushes, but the girl saw me, rushing forward, her hand outstretched, a white flower clasped between her fingers. "For Mammy," she said. "For my Mammy.
Hazel Gaynor
It has always struck me that one of the readiest ways of estimating a country's regard for law is to notice what arms the officers of the law are carrying: in England it is little batons, in France swords, in many countries revolvers, and in Russia the police used to have artillery.
Lord Dunsany
She forces me to endure this ridiculous therapy, when the so-called counselors are little better than misguided do-gooders with degrees.-Artemis Fowl
Eoin Colfer
In the days approaching Christmas, she always reminds me of the previous year: 'Jane crocheted you an entire poncho, and all you gave her was a bone-shaped beach stone.
Sara Baume
To learn to die is to learn to live. Death is the giver of life.
Michael Foley
It takes a great reader to make a great book.
Orna Ross
They began work at 5:30 and quit at 7 at night. Children six years old going home to lie on a straw pallet until time to resume work the next morning! I have seen the hair torn out of their heads by the machinery, their scalps torn off, and yet not a single tear was shed, while the poodle dogs were loved and caressed and carried to the seashore.
Mary Harris Jones
Truth is the lie you once told returning to haunt you
Dermot Healy
I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try and call on it, just like a light bulb cracking off when you throw the switch.
Lucy Grealy
There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.
Lady Marguerite Blessington
They say fingers were made before forks and hands before knives.
Jonathan Swift
... where there's one there's ten.'That's crazy math.
Emma Donoghue