Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 10

I can believe anything provided it is incredible.
Oscar Wilde
He's fine. He's fine,' he kept saying as the baby became ever more cranky and bewildered; screaming in terror if she tried to put him down.'Why should he be unhappy?' she wanted to say. 'He has had so few days in this world. Why should the unhappiness start here?
Anne Enright
Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything.
Samuel Beckett
Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it....
George Bernard Shaw
He looked the boy up and down as if he had never seen a child before and wasn't quite sure what he was supposed to do with one: eat it, ignore it or kick it down the stairs.
John Boyne
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating- people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde
My black-headed black-eyed boy. I remember every day of you. How would I forget?
Jamie O'Neill
I counsel you, put down in record even your doubts and surmises. Hereafter it may be of interest to you to see how true you guess. We learn from failure, not from success.
Bram Stoker
Life wasn't too bad. The trouble with Man was, even while he was having a good time, he didn't appreciate it. Why, thought Milligan, this very moment might be the happiest in me life. The very thought of it made him miserable.
Spike Milligan
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Oscar Wilde
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
There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
No wise man ever wished to be younger.
Jonathan Swift
Just as when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.
Cecelia Ahern
And there are moments that I would like to know what might have happened if it hadn't happened, and why it happened the way it did, and what it might have taken to prevent it from happening.
Colum McCann
All That Is Needed For Evil To Succeeded, Is For Good People To Do Nothing
Edmund Burke
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
Oscar Wilde
The whole point of being a good friend is being in the darkness. I’ll be your light, until you can be it yourself again.
Catherine Doyle
Wisdom comes with winters
Oscar Wilde
But when I read, I am completely alone. I have privacy from her and from everyone.
Sarah Crossan
Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost?
W.B. Yeats
I need a weapon,” Valkyrie muttered.“You’re an Elemental with a Necromancer ring, trained ina variety of martial arts by some of the best fighters in the world,” Skulduggery pointed out. “I’m fairly certain that makes you a weapon.”“I mean a weapon you hold. You have a gun, Tanith has a sword... I want a stick.”“I’ll buy you a stick for Christmas.
Derek Landy
You know,” he says, voice still low.“I have had nothing but trouble since you walked into my life.” “I’d walk straight back out of it if only you’d let me.
L.H. Cosway
No one's ever really ready for a troll.
Eoin Colfer
She began stroking my ankles. I considered kicking her in the cunt.
Samuel Beckett
People seldom improve when they have no other model but themselves to copy after.
Oliver Goldsmith
After all this time, he had hope, and then hope was gone, and he hates himself for giving in to hope. He, who exists only to kill the hopes of others, could not destroy the hope within himself.
John Connolly
She lives the poetry she cannot write.
Oscar Wilde
Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
My fiftieth year had come and gone,I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazedMy body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or lessIt seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless.
W.B. Yeats
I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours.
Oscar Wilde
In order to be company he must display a certain mental activity. But it need not be of a high order. Indeed it might be argued the lower the better. Up to a point. The lower the order of mental activity the better the company. Up to a point.
Samuel Beckett
After a full belly all is poetry.
Frank McCourt
Hell is full of musical amateurs.
George Bernard Shaw
Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.
Tana French
I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.
John Banville
Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.
Oscar Wilde
When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like.
Lucy Grealy
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
When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.
Oscar Wilde
I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds?
Tana French
They ex­pect­ed to lose. And there­fore, they lost. [..] Peo­ple who start think­ing deep dark thoughts in the mid­dle of a war start ex­pect­ing to lose.
Michael Scott
The writers against religion whilst they oppose every system are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.
Edmund Burke
My father was my greatest inspiration. He was a lunatic.
Spike Milligan
Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple and the simple thing is the right thing.
Oscar Wilde
A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.
Henry Giles
Revenge is what I want. Nothing but pure unadulterated revenge. But my mother brought me up to be a lady.
J.P. Donleavy
The high domed ceiling put me in mind of a skull, a brain, a mind. What did that make us, the readers?
Lia Mills
...because unlike some, I wasn't in line when they were handling out perfect genes.
Melissa Hill
For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints.
James Joyce
Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.Just as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people.And falsehoods the truths of other people.Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
Oscar Wilde
For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, the flesh being of too tender a consistence to admit a long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.
Jonathan Swift
Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.
Oscar Wilde
I am afraid we women are factionists; we always take a side, and nature has formed us for advocates rather than judges.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
With these words there came the rending scream of a shattered stirk and an angry troubling of the branches as the poor madman percolated through the sieve of a sharp yew, a wailing black meteor hurtling through green clouds, a human prickles.
Flann O'Brien
To get into the best society nowadays one has either to feed people amuse people or shock people.
Oscar Wilde
You are on your back at the foot of an aspen. In its trembling shade. She at right angles propped on her elbows head between her hands. Your eyes opened and closed have looked in hers looking in yours. In your dark you look in them again. Still. You feel on your face the fringe of her long black hair stirring in the still air. Within the tent of hair your faces are hidden from view. She murmurs, Listen to the leaves. Eyes in each other's eyes you listen to the leaves. In their trembling shade.
Samuel Beckett
Our lord is a magic lord as we all desired, and magical things have sought him from over there, and they all obey his hests.""It is so," said all but Gazic. And Gazic rose up in a pause of their gladness. "Many strange things," he said, "have entered our village, coming from over there. And it may be that human folk are best, and the ways of the fields we know.
Lord Dunsany
I fell into a restless sleep in which my dreams carried me away over misty valleys and moonlit woodlands toward a fairy glen, where I watched their beautiful midnight revels in silent awe as I whispered the words of my favorite poem. " 'You shall hear a sound like thunder, / And a veil shall be withdrawn, / When her eyes grow wide with wonder, / On that hill-top, in that dawn.
Hazel Gaynor
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Oscar Wilde