Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 3

It's a myth that crazy people don't know they're crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about our thoughts than do sane people.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
We learn from failure, not from success!
Bram Stoker
Life is a long agonized illness only curable by death.
Spike Milligan
He sometimes halted without saying anything. Either he had finally nothing to say or while having something to say he finally decided not to say it.
Samuel Beckett
World opinion, though sharply divided on nuclear tests and the risk of atmospheric pollution, could congratulate itself on being united in its opposition to cannibalism. No country in the world was prepared to support the custom of eating the dead, though the right of governments to kill people, individually or by hundreds of thousands, was not questioned for a moment.
Leonard Wibberley
About Hollywood.I feel like it’s a big ocean, full of bottom feeders, midlevel fish, the occasional shark, and some wonderful savvy whales, the elders, and the ones who guide you on your way. If you’re lucky enough, you get to be a dolphin and have your waves broken by the passage of these elders before you, but at the same time, you get an occasional shark bite in the tail and maybe one of the bottom feeders comes up and takes a little nibble. But I see myself as cresting a series of waves, dipping down, sometimes, lower than I’d like, but mainly kind of happily staying above. (smiles and takes a long drag of her cigarette) And, of course, I try to avoid the fishnets.
Anjelica Huston
In youth audacity is wise
William Allingham
poetry is not—except in a very limited sense—a form of self-expression. Who on earth supposes that the pearl expresses the oyster?
Cecil Day-Lewis
In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.
Samuel Beckett
—Help these boys build a nation their own. Ransack the histories for clues to their past. Plunder the literatures for words they can speak. And should you encounter an ancient tribe whose customs, however dimly, cast light on their hearts, tell them that tale; and you shall name the unspeakable names of your kind, and in that naming, in each such telling, they will falter a step to the light."—For only with pride may a man prosper. With pride, all things follow. Without he have pride he is a shadowy skulk whose season is night.
Jamie O'Neill
You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think?
James Joyce
And yet sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation ... Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant.
Samuel Beckett
Tell me your past, my beloved, for a man is his past, and is to be known by it.
James Stephens
There was all the world and his wife.
Jonathan Swift
For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.
Oscar Wilde
Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one’s prejudices.
Oscar Wilde
people often ignore the misfortune of others, you see. The world is a heartless place but it's not always because they don't care. It's sometimes because the are embarrassed, or because they don't know what to say, or because they simply cannot beat ro look into the eyes of someone who is suffering.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
Tanith frowned. Did people still go on DATES any more? She was sure they did. They probably called it something different though. She tried to think of the last date she'd been on. The last PROPER date. Did fighting side by side with Saracen Rue count as a date? They ended up snuggling under the moonlight, drenched in gore and pieces of brain - so it had PROBABLY been a date. If it wasn't, it was certainly a fun time had by all. Well, not ALL. But she and Saracen had sure had a blast.
Derek Landy
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
Who can say for certain that he is sincere, who can say for certain that he believes? In the midst of of our deepest emotions we are acting a comedy with ourselves; within us one self is always mocking another self. - priscilla and emily lofte
George Moore
Life makes fools of all of us sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, its our own expectations that crush us.
Paul Murray
The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.
Oscar Wilde
A very great part of the mischiefs that vex this world arises from words.
Edmund Burke
Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well.
James Joyce
No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey's end.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
What would killing the Elders result in?" "Panic? Fear? Three empty parking spaces in the Sanctuary?
Derek Landy
But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering ― curious as it may sound to you ― is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.
Oscar Wilde
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
Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel.
William Trevor
The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.
Edmund Burke
None of us mentioned An Evening of Long Goodbyes, whose race had been so catastrophic that, by the end, neither Frank nor I could summon the will to gloat. He had begun badly, getting his head stuck in the gate and having to be extricated by the stewards, and continued with a series of humiliating and distinctly uncanine trips and stumbles, disgracing himself beyond redemption in the third lap, when his muzzle came off and, to the boos of the crowd, he abandoned the race to leap over the hoardings and snatch a hot dog from the hand of a small boy.
Paul Murray
And that is how Goodwin problems were always fixed. Fix them on the surface but don't go to the root, always ignoring the elephant in the room. I think that morning was when I realized I'd grown up with an elephant in every room of my life. It was practically our family pet.
Cecelia Ahern
Religion to me almost like when God leaves – and people devise a set of rules to fill in the space.
Bono
In the yard of the inn, Daffy Cadwaladyr introduced himself. "Short for Davyd," he said pleasantly.The Londoner looked as if she'd never heard a sillier name in her life.
Emma Donoghue
Don't do it! Stay away from your potential. You'll mess it up, it's potential, leave it. Anyway, it's like your bank balance - you always have a lot less than you think.
Dylan Moran
I must be happy, he said, it is less pleasant than I should have thought.
Samuel Beckett
They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.
Oscar Wilde
Borrowed thoughts like borrowed money only show the poverty of the borrower.
Lady Marguerite Blessington
It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end. Let whoever canwin glory before death. When a warrior is gone,that will be his best and only bulwark.
Seamus Heaney
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas - too sad story. This book is very good and sad
John Boyne
For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.
Emma Donoghue
If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.
Oscar Wilde
Women have no appreciation of good looks-at least, good women have not.
Oscar Wilde
loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.
Oscar Wilde
Sarah...loved the way the light lit the silence first thing in the morning.
Niamh Boyce
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is saidIt was the dream itself enchanted me("The Circus Animal's Desertion")
W.B. Yeats
Will you promise to keep this to yourself, to not tell anyone of what we are?” By his words you’d think he was giving me a choice. Like I could say,no deal, honey bunch, I’m off to shout your secret from the rooftops, and he’d be like, oh no please don’t do that. Inreality, he’d have to kill me.
L.H. Cosway
Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
Oscar Wilde
Nichts Interessantes ist jemals richtig.
Oscar Wilde
Nor did he think of Celia any more, though he could sometimes remember having dreamt of her. If only he had been able to think of her, he would not have needed to dream of her.
Samuel Beckett
For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren't waiting for.
Tana French
I never saw "being different" in and of itself as the point to "being Goth" -- dressing different from most others, maybe, but the point to me was to get together with people who liked the same music and clothes, or at least very similar music and clothes, and go to clubs, go to movies, go to coffee-houses and hold poetry readings and, in general, just have some good harmless fun. Did I look like a dork? Sure, but so did everybody else in the club. We weren't "being different", at least not all of us, we just were different and the point was to stop bitching about being different and just have fun.
Ruadhán J. McElroy
In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thing like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.
Emma Donoghue
One day, my father said there was nothing outside infinity. He said the universe was like a cardboard box with God sitting outside surrounded by light, but I wanted to know if maybe God was sitting inside another cardboard box with the light on, and how could anyone be sure how many cardboard boxes there are.
Hugo Hamilton
Everything in my head was secondhand, too: Catholicism; Ireland's sad history, a litany of suffering and martyrdom drummed into me by priests, schoolmasters and parents who knew no better.
Frank McCourt
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
James Joyce
The years are going by us like huge birds, whom Doom and Destiny and the schemes of God have frightened up out of some old gray marsh.
Lord Dunsany
There is no moral to my song,I praise no right, I blame no wrong;I tell of things that I have seen,I show the man that I have beenAs simply as a poet canWho knows himself poet and man.
Thomas MacDonagh
Kami," he said, "you're crying." "No, I am not," Kami lied. "I got something in my eye.""You got something in your eye.""Yes. Possibly a speck of dust," Kami said, and broke down. "All right, possibly my feelings.
Sarah Rees Brennan
The difference between weakness and wickedness is much less than people suppose and the consequences are nearly always the same.
Lady Marguerite Blessington