Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 5

Art, and sadness, which last forever.
Sara Baume
The rocking of the boat by the waves was soothing but unknown. The men on the shore were asleep. Not the twelve-year-old, though. He shifted and lay on his back and decided to look up at the sky. What he saw took him by surprise. He was basically a city kid. He had never really seen the night sky for what it is. As he stared up at millions of stars, he was filled with a dread he had never known before.I was just a boy, I said to my wife in a hotel room in Cornwall. I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.
Joseph O'Neill
I bring you with reverent handsThe books of my numberless dreams.
W.B. Yeats
You think Bernadette Maguire killed him?”“Uh… no. She’s, like I said, she’s old.”“Old people can kill people too.”“I know, but…”“She could be a ninja.”“She’s not a ninja, for God’s sake. She’s somebody’s great grandmother.”“I want you to think carefully about this, Kenny. Have you ever seen her with a sword?”“What?”“How about throwing stars?”“This is ridiculous.”“Have you ever seen her dressed up as a ninja? That would have been my first clue.”The girl sucked in her cheeks so she wouldn't laugh out loud.
Derek Landy
Was that his name? I never had a chance to ask. He was too intent upon tearing out my throat for us to engage in idle chitchat.
John Connolly
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
An untied shoelace can be dangerous,' he said.'I could have tripped.'She stared at him. A moment dragged by.'I'm joking,' he said at last.She relaxed. 'Really?''Absolutely. I would never have tripped. I'm far too graceful.
Derek Landy
The only dreams that matter are the ones you have when you're awake.
John O'Callaghan
He crouched at the car 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.
Derek Landy
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. The people who get on in this world are they who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them make them.
George Bernard Shaw
A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
George Bernard Shaw
Ah dearest heart if you will but waitI'll become the ideal soulmatenevermore causing you a moment's troubleand I but a mere ectoplasmic bubbleswaying above your gorgeous headgruff and garrulous and safely dead.
Christy Brown
He things we think he's a double agent, working for them but secretly working for us. He doesn't know we know he's a triple agent, working for them but secretly working for us but really he's secretly working for them. Dexter, how's your brain?""Hurting.
Derek Landy
The aim of life is self-development
Oscar Wilde
He says every story has at least some truth in it, even if most are made up.
Darren Shan
Usually speaking the worst-bred person in company is a young traveller just returned from abroad.
Jonathan Swift
Bad artists always admire each others work.
Oscar Wilde
Men marry because they are tired women because they are curious: both are disappointed.
Oscar Wilde
There are some doubters even in the western villages. One woman told me last Christmas that she did not believe either in hell or in ghosts. Hell she thought was merely an invention got up by the priest to keep people good; and ghosts would not be permitted, she held, to go 'trapsin about the earth' at their own free will; 'but there are faeries,' she added, 'and little leprechauns, and water-horses, and fallen angels.' I have met also a man with a mohawk Indian tattooed upon his arm, who held exactly similar beliefs and unbeliefs. No matter what one doubts one never doubts the faeries, for, as the man with the mohawk Indian on his arm said to me, 'they stand to reason.' Even the official mind does not escape this faith. ("Reason and Unreason")
W.B. Yeats
Deliver me from my disciples!
Oscar Wilde
You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you do.
George Bernard Shaw
Well, OK then." He narrowed his eyes. "How about you? Do you have any...romances I should know about?""Nope. Not one.""Well, good. Excellent. There'll be plenty of time for boys when you leave college and become a nun."She smiled. "I'm glad you have such ambitious dreams for me.
Derek Landy
Stop thinking like Alice in Wonderland, Celia told herself sternly. You're a grown-up, it's no use shutting your eyes, wishing things would happen
Maeve Binchy
I can walk... see."I made my legs walk."What are you doing?""Vertical walkin'."Alec laughed. "Pitch Perfect?""Amazin' film.
L.A. Casey
It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world
Oscar Wilde
Come away, O human child!To the waters and the wildWith a faery, hand in hand,For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
W.B. Yeats
We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.
Colum McCann
How you do money is how you do life.
Orna Ross
Yet, Malice never was his Aim;He lash'd the Vice but spar'd the Name. No individual could resent,Where thousands equally were meant. His Satry points at no Defect, But what all Mortals may correct...Verses on the death of Dr Swift
Jonathan Swift
When I was young I thought money was the most important thing in life. Now that I'm old - I know it is.
Oscar Wilde
And it means snapshots, because that's what all stories I write come down to; each is a snapshot of who I was during however many days and weeks it was written. A fictional reflection of my mind fossilized, set in paper and ink, instead of stone. Memorialized, for better or worse. This is who I was, and this, and this, and this, and that, and most times I look back and wince. I'm rarely kind to who I was. But other times, looking back is bittersweet. Sometimes, I'm even grateful to the me of then who left a snapshot for the me of now. Maybe I should let go and join those who pretend the past is past, but it's a falsehood I've never learned to spin.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
But I cant stand saying one thing when everyone knows I mean another. Whats the use in such hypocrisy? If people arrange the world that way for women, theres no good pretending it’s arranged the other way...
George Bernard Shaw
Stories come alive in the telling. (…)They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read.
John Connolly
She roared with laughter. Passersby gave her strange looks, but she didn’t care. If she’d been able to stretch her vision to see beyond the trees he disappeared behind, she would have stopped laughing. She would have seen the couple who’d been in the dark street near the restaurant the previous night, again breaking into laughter when he felt it was safe to abandon the Wally persona. Everywhere she saw that one man, she didn’t see the woman behind him, with him, beside him, urging him on, supporting him. If she had, she might have wondered then who the display was really for.
Cecelia Ahern
...the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the buildings like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars.
Tana French
I was in doubt, and then everything took a hue of unreality, and I did not know what to trust, even the evidence of my own senses. Not knowing what to trust, I did not know what to do; and so had only to keep on working in what had hitherto been the groove of my life. The groove ceased to avail me, and I mistrusted myself.
Bram Stoker
Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.
Tim O'Reilly
Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle.
Samuel Beckett
The moon in her chariot of pearl
Oscar Wilde
Faith, that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.
Bram Stoker
Lucky's monologue: "(...)the strides of physical culture the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all kinds dying flying sports of all sorts autumn summer winter winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts peniciline and succedanea in a word(...)
Samuel Beckett
It is not the prisoners who need reformation it is the prisons.
Oscar Wilde
His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her. What once was life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose.
Colm Tóibín
It's okay to write a cliché in a first draft; it sets a marker that you can get far, far away from in the rewrites.
Stewart Stafford
Never trust an Italian. The Nazis did that, and look where it got them.
Paul Murray
Sometimes I feel better around you. I kind of like your face' -Nick
Sarah Rees Brennan
...art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.
Oscar Wilde
There'll be no more music, Father. But there'll be this!" He stepped into the dark, picked up the knife, and held it under their noses. "Go home. Tell your people what you saw and heard here tonight. And tell 'em that anyone we catch on these roads after dark anymore... this is what they'll get. Now that I know we're never to see the face o' God, we have nothing to lose. So, make sure you have your message right, Father, 'cause there'll be no other warning.
Eddie Lenihan
The phaenomena afforded by trades, are a part of the history of nature, and therefore may both challenge the naturalist's curiosity and add to his knowledge, Nor will it suffice to justify learned men in the neglect and contempt of this part of natural history, that the men, from whom it must be learned, are illiterate mechanicks... is indeed childish, and too unworthy of a philosopher, to be worthy of an honest answer.
Robert Boyle
It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.
Oscar Wilde
To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.
Samuel Beckett
It used to be the smartest people didn't always want to be the richest people.
Paul Murray
Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
Oscar Wilde
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
How do I love thee? wondered Orion. "Let me see. I love thee passionately and eternally...obviously eternally-that goes without saying." Holly blinked sweat from her eyes. "Is he serious?" she called over her shoulder to Foaly. "Oh, absolutely," said the centaur "If he asks you to look for birthmarks, say no immediately." "Oh, I would never." Orion assured her. "Ladies don't look for birthmarks; that is work for jolly fellows like the Goodly Beast and myself. Ladies, like Miss Short, do enough by simply existing. They exude beauty, and that is enough." "I am not exuding anything." said Holly, through gritted teeth. Orion tapped her shoulder. "I beg to differ. You're exuding right now, a wonderful aura. It's pastel blue with little dolphins." Holly gripped the wheel tightly. "I'm going to be sick. Did he just say pastel blue?" "And dolphins, little ones," said Foaly.
Eoin Colfer
Well, young man, have you found anyone worthy of your respect?"Artemis smiled back. "Yes," he said. "I believe I have.
Eoin Colfer
I made the valuable discovery that practicing wasn't a matter of time at all. It was a matter of intensity. Five minutes spent working consciously and hard at the elimination of an error, was worth five hours just playing away ignoring errors as if they hadn't happened.
Leonard Wibberley
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
Iris Murdoch
Habit is not mere subjugation it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
Elizabeth Bowen
If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.
Oscar Wilde