Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 2

Niagara ... is the first disappointment in the married life of many Americans who spend their honeymoon there.
Oscar Wilde
What's a Dullahan?''He's a headless horseman, in the service of the banshee.''Headless?''Yes.''Seriously?''Yes.''So he has no head?''That's usually what headless means.''No head at all?''You're really getting hung up on this headless thing, aren't you?''It's just kind of silly, even for us.''Yet you spend your days with a living skeleton.''But at least he has a head.''True.''He even has a spare.
Derek Landy
China is the same age as I am, and even I have to admit that she wears it better!" He laughed, then stopped and peered at her. "Because I'm a skeleton" he explained.
Derek Landy
We are different, my friend. We are visionaries. A monkey looks up and sees and banana, and that is as far as he looks. But a visionary looks up and sees the moon.
Eoin Colfer
Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.
Oscar Wilde
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.
Oscar Wilde
Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.
Oscar Wilde
The Cat and the Moon The cat went here and thereAnd the moon spun round like a top,And the nearest kin of the moon,The creeping cat, looked up.Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,For, wander and wail as he would,The pure cold light in the skyTroubled his animal blood.Minnaloushe runs in the grassLifting his delicate feet.Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?When two close kindred meet,What better than call a dance?Maybe the moon may learn,Tired of that courtly fashion,A new dance turn.Minnaloushe creeps through the grassFrom moonlit place to place,The sacred moon overheadHas taken a new phase.Does Minnaloushe know that his pupilsWill pass from change to change,And that from round to crescent,From crescent to round they range?Minnaloushe creeps through the grassAlone, important and wise,And lifts to the changing moonHis changing eyes.
W.B. Yeats
She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.
James Joyce
Tomorrow, smile at a perfect stranger and mean it.
John O'Callaghan
The world is like a board with holes in it and the square men have got into the round holes and the round into the square.
Bishop Berkeley
Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman
Oscar Wilde
And what are your interests and hobbies, Nicholas?" Annabel asked faintly, sounding like a cross between a television interviewer and a hostage. Nick considered this for a minute, and then said "I like swords." Annabel leaned over her plate and asked, her voice changing "You fence?" "Not exactly," Nick drawled. "I'm more freestyle.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated: they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only “frail.” They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative, only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all: liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls.
George Bernard Shaw
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
Iris Murdoch
has it ever occurred to you that where there is no anger, there is also no love?
Siobhan Dowd
If you do it in the bookies, it's a bet. . . . If you pay some 23-year-old in an Armani suit two hundred grand to go to the window for you, it's a derivative.
Paul Murray
The fear of dogs is deep and universal amongst all that are less than Man.
Lord Dunsany
Marian was suddenly overcome by an appalling crippling panic. She was very frightened at the idea of arriving. But it was more than that. She feared the rocks and the cliffs and the grotesque dolmen and the ancient secret things. Her two companions seemed no longer reassuring but dreadfully alien and even sinister. She felt, for the first time in her life, completely isolated and in danger. She became in an instant almost faint with terror.She said, as a cry for help, ‘I’m feeling terribly nervous’.‘I know you are,’ said Scottow.(…)Marian was appalled at the sudden quietness. But the insane panic had left her. She was frightened now in an ordinary way, sick in her stomach, shy, tongue-tied, horribly aware of the onset of a new world.
Iris Murdoch
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.
Niall Williams
I want to know what's wrong with loving someone for life? Even when they're dead? What exactly is wrong with that? Why should I put him away, out of my mind? Like he's out of fashion. Does no one love for ever any more? Is no one built for the long road?
Josephine Hart
At least half of his hunters writhed on the ground with grubs already inside them, causing horrendous agony. These had to be helped away by terrified Ship People whose courage lay trembling in their hearts as lightly as leaves.
Peadar Ó Guilín
After Abalyn said what she said, I panicked. Someone tells me I can't remember what I definitely do remember, and sometimes I panic. I'm not as used to it as I often pretend. As I pretend to be used to it, I mean to say. The false memories.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
Oscar Wilde
Every single time you crossed over for me and met me on my side. I realize now, I don't think I ever met you in the middle. And I don't think I ever once said that you for that.
Cecelia Ahern
Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.
Oscar Wilde
Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on... The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.
Oscar Wilde
There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
Oscar Wilde
In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.
Robert Lynd
Each of us keeps battened down inside himself a sort of lunatic giant -impossible socially but full-scale. It's the knockings and batterings we sometimes hear in each other that keep our intercourse from utter banality.
Elizabeth Bowen
One might trouble one's dainty snout with a whiff of the taleggio displayed in an artisanal cheese shop, or take a saucer of jasmine tea and a knuckle of fennel-scented snuff at a counter of buffed Big Nothing granite. But there was a want in these ladies yet, and it was for the rude life of youth.
Kevin Barry
There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it.
Frank McCourt
Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.
James Joyce
Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.
Oscar Wilde
Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Edmund Burke
The ecstatic vision and social program sought to rebuild a society upward from its grass roots but on principles of religious and economic egalitarianism, with free healing brought directly to the peasant homes and free sharing of whatever they had in return. The deliberate conjunction of magic and meal, miracle and table, free compassion and open commensality, was a challenge launched not just at Judaism’s strictest purity regulations, or even at the Mediterranean’s patriarchal combination of honor and shame, patronage and clientage, but at civilization’s eternal inclination to draw lines, invoke boundaries, establish hierarchies, and maintain discriminations.
John Dominic Crossan
The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves.
Derek Landy
It would be unfair to expect other people to be as brilliant as oneself.
Oscar Wilde
She had worried she would break if her heart broke, but she wasn't broken. She had lost everything, but she was not lost. It seemed a worthwhile thing to know.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Loyalty in a critic is corruption.
George Bernard Shaw
Money can't buy friends but you can get a better class of enemy.
Spike Milligan
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
W.B. Yeats
A day's work is a day's work neither more nor less and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance a night's repose and due leisure whether he be painter or ploughman.
George Bernard Shaw
When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift
A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.
Elizabeth Bowen
Knowledge is a matter of knowing facts. Wisdom is a matter of understanding and applying principles. A certain amount of knowledge is necessary for wisdom, and without wisdom, knowledge is not only useless, it's dangerous.
Hilda van Stockum
Society--civilized society, at least--is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef ... Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees...
Oscar Wilde
Some men never recover from education.
Oliver St. John Gogarty
The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.
Edmund Burke
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
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
George Bernard Shaw
The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.
Peter Rollins
I said: 'A line will take us hours maybe;Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
W.B. Yeats
Time is a waste of money.
Oscar Wilde
A great story can change the world.
Stewart Stafford
The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.
Oscar Wilde
I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.
Oscar Wilde
Different men view the same things in different ways. And the same men in the course of a few years alter their whole view of life. They have simply changed their companions on the road. Indeed the breaking with one set of people and the forming ties of friendship with others of a different type is often but the outward evidence and result of a hidden and inward change of the more intimate friendships of the mind.
Basil W. Maturin
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!
John Anster
Well don't demand the spotlight if you can't handle the attention.
Melissa Hill