Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 12

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
Oscar Wilde
He crouched at the care window and looked in. "What a lovely family you have. What a charming family. They're all lovely. Except for that one." His finger jabbed the glass. "That one's a bit ugly."The American stepped towards him. "What? What did you say?""Oh, don't worry. I'm sure his personality makes up for his face.
Derek Landy
I know it does not matter that I do not understand.
Brendan Kennelly
As soon as she says this, I realize she is just like everyone else, and wish I was back at home so that all the things I do not understand could be the same as they always are.
Claire Keegan
Originality is the most deadly mirage in all of art. You can chase it from now until doomsday, and you'll only find yourself lost and dying of thirst.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
And I'm not saying it's a bad song, you know, or anything like that. All I'm saying is that if you get, I don't know, a broom, say, and dip it in some brake fluid, put the other end up my arse, stick me on a trampoline in a moving lift, and I would write a better song on the walls. That's all I'm saying.
Dylan Moran
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.
Oscar Wilde
We bite back the things we can't say and we cushion every surface for the inevitable moment when they all come fighting out.
Moïra Fowley-Doyle
The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
Oscar Wilde
Oscar’s hobby was saving people. He used to save people all the time, and fix things that were broken and catch people when they were falling. It wasn’t a skill you’d immediately know about or notice. Stevie said that Oscar had a gift and the gift was that he could smell things you wouldn’t imagine would smell of anything- things like sadness and desperation. Things like far and hopelessness.He never made a big deal about it, but he was quiet and confident – and when you believe in own abilities, you are much more likely to be always ready to act on them, which Oscar always was. Whenever I asked him about it, he claimed that his were not exceptional or extraordinary abilities in the slightest. Everyone, he said, is able to tell when someone is in need of help, but few people really take the time to listen to their instincts, and that, he said, was the only difference between him and a lot of other of people.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
SummerThe seasons between spring and autumn, comprising in the Northern Hemispherethe warmest months of the year: June, July and August. The period of finest development, perfection, or beauty previous to any decline; the summer of life.― Cecilia Ahern
Cecilia Ahern
JACKYour duty as a gentleman calls you back. ALGERNONMy duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.
Oscar Wilde
What am I supposed to do when the best part of me was always you?And what am I supposed to say when I'm all choked up and you're OK?I'm falling to pieces
The Script
Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard Some do it with a bitter look Some with a flattering word The coward does it with a kiss The brave man with a sword.
Oscar Wilde
There is no error more absurd, and yet more rooted in the heart of man, than the belief that his sufferings will promote his spiritual safety.
Charles Robert Maturin
Girl going past clinging to a young man's arm. Putting up her face like a duck to the moon. Drinking joy. Green in her eyes. Spinal curvature. No chin, mouth like a frog. Young man like a pug. Gazing down at his sweetie with the face of a saint reading the works of God. Hold on, maiden, you've got him. He's your boy. Look out, Puggy, that isn't a maiden you see before you, it's a work of imagination. Nail him, girlie. Nail him to the contract. Fly laddie, fly off with your darling vision before she turns into a frow, who spends all her life thinking of what the neighbours think.
Joyce Cary
I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.
Tana French
Love doesn't demand perfection, but it does ask you to give yourself with less reserve than you'd prefer.
Thomas Moore
I kind of thought actually that Trevor was gone completely mental when he called up here a few weeks ago. Like, why would he not text or email or Facebook? What's with all the reality, I thought. Does he not know he's a million times cooler in virtual form?
Donal Ryan
The shovel worked in and out of the light beams as the dirt hit him in the stomach, on his back, fell into his ears, his eyes, as I covered him along with the things that had made him: his walks, his rest, his eating when hungry, the stars he watched sometimes, the first day I brought him home, the first time he saw snow, and every second of his friendship, what he took with him into silence and stillness ...
Gerard Donovan
All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife's response that came - as if in compensation for too little said before - when he wondered why his wandering had led him back to these old battlefields: in his sixty-ninth year he was establishing his survivor's status.
William Trevor
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
Well, what do they all amount to, these kings and captains and bishops and lawyers and such like? They just leave you in the ditch to bleed to death; and the next thing is, you meet them down there, for all the airs they give themselves.
George Bernard Shaw
Writing is the spectrum through which the chaos of life can be seen, studied and understood.
Stewart Stafford
Let time that makes you homely make you sage.
Thomas Parnell
If you lose someone, you feel a loss, then after a while you fill in the hole in your life and the loss gradually gets smaller and smaller and eventually goes away. There's a point to the pain. There's a reason and a direction.
Marian Keyes
you simply couldn't guard yourself against dreams. they attacked late at night when a person was at the most vulnerable.
Kate O'Riordan
Outside the family circle, papa, I'm glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man.
Oscar Wilde
God promised men that obedient women would be found on all corners of the Earth. I've been all over the Earth, and I call bullshit on that!" Alec snapped as he glared directly at me.I snorted. "I hate to burst your bubble, but God also made the Earth round, he's got jokes.
L.A. Casey
and I wanted this girl who was like no girl I had ever known, wanted her not in spite of her moods and her secret bruises and her sad attempts at artifice but because of them, because of them all.
Tana French
All we can hope for is that he will fall into the ocean with a bar of soap in his pocket.
Eoin Colfer
It's important to be heroic ambitious productive efficient creative and progressive but these qualities don't necessarily nurture the soul. The soul has different concerns of equal value: downtime for reflection conversation and reverie beauty that is captivating and pleasuring relatedness to the environs and to people and any animal's rhythm of rest and activity.
Thomas Moore
Breslin gives me his wise-teacher smile, which is kind and crinkly and would make me feel warm all over if I was dumber than a bag of hair.
Tana French
Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!
Oscar Wilde
But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.
Sara Baume
This is true joy of life-the being used for a purpose that is recognized by yourself as a right one instead of being a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
George Bernard Shaw
Leif gripped Benny's shoulders to hold him back, but he broke free and chased the truck, pumping his tiny arms and legs with great furry."I love you!" he called out, when he was just ten feet away. I gripped the metal bars, my throat choked with emotion."I love you!" Silas cried, as he followed.They both kept after us, sprinting wildly behind the cage. I watched their mouths moving, saying those words over and again, as the truck bounded through the woods and their small bodies disappeared, unreachable, behind the trees.
Anna Carey
Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.
Oscar Wilde
We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.
Jonathan Swift
The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
Oscar Wilde
No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.
George Bernard Shaw
Because of course, for every revelation of weakness, there had to be an equal and opposite show of strength.
Jane Casey
To be always what I am - and so changed from what I was.
Samuel Beckett
I may have had moments of regret in my life, but you know, they wouldn't add up to an hour.
Emma Donoghue
Here God is not approached as an object that we must love, but as a mystery present in the very act of love itself.
Peter Rollins
Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
Edmund Burke
It's impossible for a creative artist to be either a Puritan or a Fascist, because both are a negation of the creative urge. The only things a creative artist can be opposed to are ugliness and injustice.
Liam O'Flaherty
It's still very difficult for me to rely. Your weakness, the blessing of your weakness is it forces you into friendships. The things that you lack, you look for in others.
Bono
[Artemis] returned to the aft bay for Mulch's version of a briefing. The dwarf had drawn a crude diagram on a backlit wall panel. In fairness, there were more artistic chimpanzees. And less pungent ones. Mulch was using a carrot as a pointer, or more accurately, several carrots. Dwarfs liked carrots. 'This is Koboi Labs,' He mumbled around a mouthful of vegetable. 'That?' exclaimed Root. 'I realize, Julius, that it is not an accurate schematic.'The Commander exploded from his chair. 'An accurate schematic? It's a rectangle for heaven's sake!'Mulch was unperturbed. 'That's not important. This is the important bit.' 'That wobbly line?' 'It's a fissure,' pouted the dwarf. 'Anybody can see that.''Anybody in kindergarten maybe. So it's a fissure, so what?''This is the clever bit. Y'see that fissure is not usually there.'Root began strangling the air again. Something he was doing more and more lately.
Eoin Colfer
If there is anything worse than evil, it is nothingness. At least evil has a form, and a voice, and a purpose, however depraved. Perhaps some good can even come out of evil: a terrible deed of violence against someone weaker may lead others to act in order to ensure that such a deed is not perpetrated again, whereas before they might have been unaware of the reasons why an individual might behave in such a way, or they might simply have chosen to ignore them. And evil, as we saw with the Blacksmith, always contains within itself the possibility of its own redemption. It is not evil that is the enemy of hope: it is nothingness.
John Connolly
Do you think we’ll be waiting long?” Valkyrie asked,keeping her voice low.“The last time we were in this building, we accused theGrand Mage of being a traitor,” Skulduggery said. “Yes, I thinkwe’ll be waiting long.
Derek Landy
I suppose it is that sickness and weakness are selfish things and turn our inner eyes and sympathy on ourselves, whilst health and strength give love rein, and in thought and feeling he can wander where he wills.
Bram Stoker
Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.
George Bernard Shaw
I don't want to earn my living, I want to live.
Oscar Wilde
While the light remains,' said Carde, speaking slowly in his high deliberate voice, 'only do not forsake the joy of life. If you shall have given all your kisses, you will give too few. And as leaves fall from withered wreaths which you may see spread upon the cups and floating there, so for us, who now as lovers hope for so much, perhaps tomorrow's day will close the doom.
Iris Murdoch
When you‟re taught from birth that you don‟t matter in any way, that your wants and even needs are irrelevant, then of course you‟ll struggle to value yourself.
Danu Morrigan
We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.
Colum McCann
There's nothing man can imagine that nature hasn't already created a zillion times better.
Stewart Stafford
Certain battles were won by retreating.
Eoin Colfer
You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.
John Banville