Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 67

Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--''Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.
Iris Murdoch
I could wish to spy the nakedness of their hearts, and through the different disguises of customs, climates, and religion, find out what is good in them, to fashion my own by. It is for this reason that I have not seen the Palais Royal - nor the facade of the Louvre - nor have attempted to swell the catalogues we have of pictures, statues, and churches - I conceive every fair being as a temple, and would rather enter in, and see the original drawings and loose sketches hung up in it, than the Transfiguration of Raphael itself.
Laurence Sterne
She'd tried her hand at most things, but drew the line at honesty.
Roddy Doyle
My black-headed black-eyed boy. I remember every day of you. How would I forget?
Jamie O'Neill
As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
Oscar Wilde
But now I remember, of course, I'm never going to be old.
Sara Baume
Truly to realize the ambitions of a science of mind does not solely involve learning about such issues as how we know, perceive and solve problems; it involves finding out tow hat extent the world outside us is knowable by us, and indeed prescribing the limits of inquiry for disciplines like Physics which claim to afford knowledge of the external physical world.
Sean O Nuallain
The way one is envisaged by other people - what easier way is there of envisaging oneself? There is a fatalism in one's acceptance of it. Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice - choice of those who are to surround one, choice of those most likely to see you rightly - is the only escape.
Elizabeth Bowen
All That Is Needed For Evil To Succeeded, Is For Good People To Do Nothing
Edmund Burke
Belief made no difference to the truth.
Diane Duane
Human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become.
Niall Williams
By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.
William Trevor
He specialized in a particular kind of friendship with that eight-limbed, inscrutable, treacherous creature, the happily married coupe, adapting himself closely and lightly to the composite personality.A peevish dead woman...it's absurd...how much less humiliating for them both it would have been if she had taken a lover.
Elizabeth Bowen
Imagine if we had no secrets, no respite from the truth. What if everything was laid bare the moment we introduced ourselves?
Catherine Doyle
We need people in our lives with whom we can be as open as possible. To have real conversations with people may seem like such a simple, obvious suggestion, but it involves courage and risk.
Thomas Moore
Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
Oscar Wilde
And out the bus window, here is my dead world come true, my whole dead world in motion.
Sara Baume
Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.
Samuel Beckett
Fascinating ... The whole thing [the school dance] seems to work on a similar principle to a supercollider. You know, two streams of opposingly charged particles accelerated till they're just under the speed of light, and then crashed into each other? Only here alcohol, accentuated secondary sexual characteristics and primitive "rock and roll" beats take the place of velocity.
Paul Murray
the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.
Oscar Wilde
People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.
Oscar Wilde
I know that big people don't like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like, How's school? Are you a good boy? Did you say your prayers? but if you ask them did they say their prayers you might be hit on the head.
Frank McCourt
This is the true joy in life the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap.
George Bernard Shaw
As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar it will cease to be popular.
Oscar Wilde
I’d stare up at the sky, reminding myself that Caleb and I were both underneath it. That wherever he was, whatever he was doing, we would always share something.
Anna Carey
Policeman says, "Son you can't stay here"I said, "There's someone I'm waiting for if it's a day, a month, a year"Gotta stand my ground even if it rains or snowsIf she changes her mind this is the first place she will go
The Script
And like any dog, like any savage, I lay there enjoying myself, harming no man, selling nothing, competing not at all, thinking no evil, smiled on by the sun, bent over by the trees, and softly folded in the arms of the earth.
John Stewart Collis
You know, sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.''And yet it is still extremely funny.
Cecelia Ahern
Everyone's got a different story.
Emma Donoghue
As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy withwhich we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live,including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament, because we are never satisfied with them.... At the elections some candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is impossible. Things will not stay as they are.Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years in school, oldage and widows’ pensions, votes for women, and short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers’ wigs in the courts are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever shall be; but their great-grandmothers would have set down anyone who told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted them to come as wicked.
George Bernard Shaw
God and other artists are always a little obscure.....
Oscar Wilde
To gain that which is worth having it may be necessary to lose everything else.
Bernadette Devlin
It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.
Oscar Wilde
Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
For some people, she thought, trials were only temporary; they sailed towards happiness through the roughest weather.
Emma Donoghue
But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
Jonathan Swift
Never trust an Italian. The Nazis did that, and look where it got them.
Paul Murray
Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.
Jonathan Swift
So Father Ring went off in the lofty mood of a man who has defended a principle at a great sacrifice to himself, but that very night he began to brood and he continued to brood till that sickly looking voluptuary of a ten-shilling note took on all the radiance and charm of a virgin of seventeen.
Frank O'Connor
If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.
Edmund Burke
Happiness is a rare plant that seldom takes root on earth-few ever enjoyed it except for a brief period the search after it is rarely rewarded by the discovery but there is an admirable substitute for it... a contented spirit.
Lady Marguerite Blessington
Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.
Iris Murdoch
I bet," said Mulch, "that you would set the world on fire just to watch it burn."Opal tapped the suggestion into a small electronic notepad on her pocket computer.Thanks for that. Now, tell me everything.
Eoin Colfer
All parents set out with expectations, hopes and dreams for their child. When a child is diagnosed with a health problem, these aspirations are altered. While one parent is hoping to see their child graduate from university, another is praying that they can live pain free
Sharon Dempsey
Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.
Oscar Wilde
Now or never was the time.
Laurence Sterne
He says every story has at least some truth in it, even if most are made up.
Darren Shan
She clenched her fist in his T-shirt, put her other arm around those too-broad, too-real shoulders. When he tried to pull away, she held on tight. Kami felt the surrender in his mind a moment before he laid his face in the curve of her neck. The whole world was so real it hurt.Kami whispered into Jared's hair, "I'm always on your side.
Sarah Rees Brennan
He's crazy," Bruno said, twirling a finger in circles around the side of his head and whistling to indicate just how crazy he thought he was. "He went up to a cat on the street the other day and invited her over for afternoon tea." "What did the cat say?" asked Gretel, who was making a sandwich in the corner of the kitchen. "Nothing." explained Bruno. "It was a cat.
John Boyne
I don't want to earn a living, I want to live.
Oscar Wilde
Maybe you’re not so bad after all.’He leant across the seat, jabbing his finger in the air. ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it. I have a reputation to uphold, you know.
Catherine Doyle
Oh, I can't explain. 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. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life.
Oscar Wilde
But neither milk-white rose nor red May bloom in prison air;The shard, the pebble, and the flint, Are what they give us there:For flowers have been known to heal A common man's despair.
Oscar Wilde
For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.
Colm Tóibín
The British could leave and half India wouldn't notice us leaving just as they didn't notice us arriving. All our reforms of administration might be reforms on the moon for all it has to do with them..
J.G. Farrell
What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than begin talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.
Oscar Wilde
I may have had moments of regret in my life, but you know, they wouldn't add up to an hour.
Emma Donoghue
She looks as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.
Jonathan Swift
The parts of our lives when we write them down seem to belong in different books, by different writers even. What all these bits and pieces make up I don't know. There is no plot. Perhaps meaning is something we invent afterward, putting it all together, like imagined God.
Niall Williams
She's in the Catskill," Shopie began, but Scathach reached over and pinched her hand. "
Michael Scott