Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 8

You are lucky to feel sadness.
John O'Callaghan
Is there a word for adults when they aren't parents?"Steppa laughs. "Folks with other things to do?""Like what things?""Jobs, I guess. Friends. Trips. Hobbies.
Emma Donoghue
There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.
Seán O'Casey
For good and evil man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity.
Joyce Cary
Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.
Oscar Wilde
I don’t want to beone of those easily forgotten people, so important at the time, so special, soinfluential, and so treasured, yet years later just a vague face and a distantmemory.
Cecelia Ahern
It is easy-terribly easy-to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to to break a man's spirit is Devil's work.
George Bernard Shaw
Doobie always wanted to see the badge. It was shiny, and he was eight.
Eoin Colfer
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen
Love releases us into the realm of divine imagination, where the soul is expanded and reminded of its unearthly cravings and needs. We think that when a lover inflates his loved one he is failing to acknowledge her flaws - "Love is blind." But it may be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic nature of another person, the halo, the aureole of divinity. Certainly from the perspective of ordinary life this is madness and illusion. But if we let loose our hold on our philosophies and psychologies of enlightenment and reason, we might learn to appreciate the perspective of eternity that enters life as madness, Plato's divine frenzy.
Thomas Moore
Ignorance, as they say, is usually fatal, but sometimes it can be bliss.
Eoin Colfer
You can’t save everyone. It’s not an option.
Darren Shan
As I’ve said before, “the Mod generation”, contrary to popular belief, was not born in even 1958, but in the 1920s after a steady gestation from about 1917 or so. Now, Mod certainly came of age, fully sure of itself by 1958, completely misunderstood by 1963, and in a perpetual cycle of reinvention and rediscovery of itself by 1967 and 1975, respectively, but it was born in the 1920s, and I will maintain this. I don’t care who disagrees with me, and there are dozens of reasons that I do so —from the Art Deco aesthetic, to flapper fashions (complete with bobbed hair), to androgyny and subtle effeminacy, to jazz.
Ruadhán J. McElroy
Oh, so your middle finger has a mind of its own then?" Alex asked with an amused look.I glared at him and said, "Yeah, and she was just sticking up for me
L.A. Casey
Zsa Zsa Gabor when asked which of the Gabor women was the oldest said "She'll never admit it but I believe it is Mama." When men grow virtuous in their old age they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.
Jonathan Swift
The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life or of the work.
William Butler Yeats
There's nothing man can imagine that nature hasn't already created a zillion times better.
Stewart Stafford
I wrote when I did not know life;now that I know life, I have no more to say.
Oscar Wilde
I look at the cake in my mother's arms and think: here stands the only person in the whole world who'd go to such trouble for fractious, ungrateful me.
Sara Baume
But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.
Iris Murdoch
Some stories wait their turn to be told, others just tap you on the shoulder and insist you tell them.
Michael Scott
They have gone. And the tunnel is about to close. So, boys, I am looking for someone to blame.
Eoin Colfer
My Salome is a mystic the sister of Salammbô a Saint Thérèse who worships the moon.
Oscar Wilde
Be silent and safe - silence never betrays you.
John Boyle O'Reilly
There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one's humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before.
John Connolly
Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you.
Anne Enright
Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
James Joyce
Daylight tricks you into thinking what you see is truth, lets you go through life thinking you know everything. But the truth is we are sleepwalkers. We walk through the night that is chaos and dark and forever keeps its truth to itself.
Paul Lynch
To obtain and possess the kingdoms of the world, with their power and glory, by violent injustice is to worship Satan. To obtain and possess the kingdom, the power, and the glory by nonviolent justice is to worship God.
John Dominic Crossan
A man who takes into consideration the feelings of others even when arranging the manner of his own death shows a nobility of character which compels the admiration of all classes.
Flann O'Brien
Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer. They control the most simple Proustian episode, and an understanding of their mechanism must precede any particular analysis of their application.
Samuel Beckett
You drive me crazy!""You were always crazy. I just highlight it.
Anna McPartlin
People don’t read to enlighten themselves or seek to gain some valuable insight into their own psychology. People read to escape.
Dermot Davis
[Man] progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.
George Bernard Shaw
The public has a taste for supping with the great.
Ulick O'Connor
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
Iris Murdoch
Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life.
Oscar Wilde
I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should not probably forget all about them.
Oscar Wilde
The ones whose light will remain with me long after they have burnt out are the ones that had grace. Because it's rare that the gift comes with grace. Some of the biggest arseholes I've ever met are the most gifted. Because it's "pretty girl" syndrome. Being gifted is like being born beautiful. You don't have to work a day in a year in your life for it. You were born with it. In one sense, it's like blue blood, money, gift, or beauty. They are the things that should make you the most humble, because they are not the things you have earned. They are the things you were given. Yet, it is my experience that they male people the most spoiled. And the people who work the hardest, and who have overcome the most obstacles on their life, who have reason to beat their breasts are the most humble, sometimes. I can't get over that. it's bewildering to me. To make it through success and still have manners, to still have curiosity, intellectual curiosity, to still have some grace, to keep your dignity, that is really... rare.
Bono
Woman is not made to be the admiration of all, but the happiness of one.
Edmund Burke
They said her duck recipe and the Chinese music were so dramatic everything else sounded anemic.
Frank McCourt
In my time first cousins did not meet like strangers. But we are learning modesty from the Americans, and old English ways are too gross for us.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
We're not retreating, we're advancing in reverse.' --Skulduggery Pleasant
Derek Landy
When I am reading a book whether wise or silly it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.
Jonathan Swift
The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.
Edmund Burke
Equal time is not necessary when dealing with evil. Nazis do not merit equal or fair treatment.
Robert Fisk
The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, certainly, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.
Mark O'Connell
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
Oscar Wilde
In real friendship the judgment the genius the prudence of each party become the common property of both.
Maria Edgeworth
Usually speaking the worst-bred person in company is a young traveller just returned from abroad.
Jonathan Swift
You will never find me in trouble. You will find me in the library. If you can remember where that is.
Sarah Rees Brennan
A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere - no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift to articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton...
George Bernard Shaw
A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking
Anne Enright
He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment. Sometimes the dullness came to the fore with a strange and insistent ache which he would entertain briefly, but learn to keep at bay. Mostly, however, it was the contentment he entertained; the slow ease and the silence could, once night had fallen, fill him with a happiness that nothing, no society nor the company of any individual, no glamour or glitter, could equal.
Colm Tóibín
Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth.
Emma Donoghue
They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man's goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage.
Jonathan Swift
Everything worth knowing about the 1980s I learned from obsessively reading Bloom County collections when I was nine and Derek Jarman's diaries when I was twenty.
Ruadhán J. McElroy
A wise woman will always let her husband have her way.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.
George Bernard Shaw
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
Oscar Wilde