Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 6

He specialized in a particular kind of friendship with that eight-limbed, inscrutable, treacherous creature, the happily married coupe, adapting himself closely and lightly to the composite personality.A peevish dead woman...it's absurd...how much less humiliating for them both it would have been if she had taken a lover.
Elizabeth Bowen
It is in games that many men discover their paradise.
Robert Lynd
I rolled my eyes. "Just go get your tattoo before I change me mind, you dirty fuck."Alec waggled his eyebrows. "I'd give you a dirty fuck, kitten.
L.A. Casey
Fascinating ... The whole thing [the school dance] seems to work on a similar principle to a supercollider. You know, two streams of opposingly charged particles accelerated till they're just under the speed of light, and then crashed into each other? Only here alcohol, accentuated secondary sexual characteristics and primitive "rock and roll" beats take the place of velocity.
Paul Murray
When I act tough they listen politely till the spasm passes. They know.
Frank McCourt
Unhappiness where's when I was young, And we didn't give a damn, 'Cause we were raised, To see life as fun and take it if we can.
Dolores O'Riordan
All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.
Colum McCann
Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.
Oscar Wilde
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Seamus Heaney
Within this restless, hurried, modern worldWe took our hearts' full pleasure - You and I,And now the white sails of our ship are furled,And spent the lading of our argosy.Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,For very weeping is my gladness fled,Sorrow has paled my young mouth's vermilion,And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.But all this crowded life has been to theeNo more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spellOf viols, or the music of the seaThat sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.
Oscar Wilde
We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's a chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.
Colum McCann
When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be.
Oscar Wilde
We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.
George Bernard Shaw
We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.
Colum McCann
I know what other people think about me,” Rusty told her. “ ‘That Rusty,’ they say. ‘Charming and handsome,’ they say first, of course—they’re not blind. Then they add, ‘All the ambition and drive of a chocolate sundae.’
Sarah Rees Brennan
People get sick and sometimes they get better and sometimes they don't. And it doesn't matter if the sickness is cancer or if it's depression. Sometimes the drugs work and sometimes they don't. Sometimes the drugs work for a while and then they stop. Sometimes the alternative stuff works and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes you wonder if no outside interference makes any difference at all; if an illness is like a storm, if it simply has to run its course and, at the end of it, depending on how robust you are, you will be alive. Or you will be dead.
Marian Keyes
There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water--it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.
Colum McCann
Truth is the lie you once told returning to haunt you
Dermot Healy
Friends don't menace friends with giant terrifying swords, okay?
Sarah Rees Brennan
Just because an apple falls one hundred times out of a hundred does not mean it will fall on the hundred and first.
Derek Landy
Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you.
Flann O'Brien
A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.
George Bernard Shaw
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
George Bernard Shaw
A child can learn what is right as easy as what is wrong and whatever impressions are made on the mind when it is plastic will remain there.
Joseph Devlin
The hands of fate keep time on a heart-shaped clock.
Darren Shan
Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well.Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta.Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.
Oscar Wilde
She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork.
Jonathan Swift
He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.
James Joyce
It was a trap. It was so obviously a trap.Darquesse smiled.
Derek Landy
Doors are for people with no imagination.
Derek Landy
There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me think of twilight and mists and dead maidens. Tonight it tinkled in my mouth like secret laughter.
John Banville
Hope like the gleaming taper's light adorns and cheers our way And still as darker grows the night emits a lighter ray.
Oliver Goldsmith
To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.
Oscar Wilde
I decided I would teach Mrs. P. a lesson by cooking my own meal.
Paul Murray
He told me and Rafe to stay put in case you came home, burn the note and get hot water and disinfectant and bandages rea
Tana French
As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.
Joseph O'Neill
Stephanie could see the greed seep into the watery eyes of herfather’s other brother, a horrible little man called Fergus, as henodded sadly and spoke sombrely and pocketed the silverwarewhen he thought no one was looking
Derek Landy
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
Oscar Wilde
It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wife iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.
Trish Deseine
A lily-girl, not made for this world’s pain.
Oscar Wilde
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
Oscar Wilde
Wait," said Butler. "Just wait, Holly. Artemis has a plan." He squinted through the green dome. "What is your plan, Artemis?"All Artemis could do was smile and shrug.
Eoin Colfer
I keep being told that my writing is getting better and better. - Now, at first I am thrilled by that, but then I think, Isn't everybody's? Do some authors grow cozy with their own style, and stay there?I think of writing fiction as an art form. As such, it's a constant exploration of new and developing ideas. If any of my books were much like my others, I don't think I'd even bother to write them.
Edward Fahey
For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of a man, even our anthropologists have realised that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.
Samuel Beckett
Bread – like real love – took time, cultivation, strong loving hands and patience. It lived, rising and growing to fruition only under the most perfect circumstances.
Melissa Hill
If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.
Edmund Burke
What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
Oscar Wilde
And the bell jangled, the driver started. The bus whirled off, to the last stop, the lonely room, the lonely night.
Brian Moore
What dreams would he have, not seeing. Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born that way?
James Joyce
If you have to injure someone, then make it so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.
Michael Scott
I cannot have chaos erupting around me until I am prepared for it. I am a collector. I am an observer. I don't participate. My resources, and my standing, must be secure before I can allow the uncertainty of war to crash down upon us.
Derek Landy
Then she gave one last burst of music. The white Moon heard it, and she forgot the dawn, and lingered on in the sky. The red rose heard it, and it trembled all over with ecstasy, and opened its petals to the cold morning air. Echo bore it to her purple cavern in the hills, and woke the sleeping shepherds from their dreams. It floated through the reeds of the river, and they carried its message to the sea.
Oscar Wilde
No passion so effectively robs the mind of its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
Edmund Burke
The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
Oscar Wilde
And be thinking, remembering. Trying to. All difficult dark stuff, stories stuffed away, like old socks into old pillowcases. Not quite knowing the weight of truth in them much more. And things that I have let be a long time in the interests of happiness, or at least that daily contentment that I was once I do believe mistress of
Sebastian Barry
But neither milk-white rose nor red May bloom in prison air;The shard, the pebble, and the flint, Are what they give us there:For flowers have been known to heal A common man's despair.
Oscar Wilde
The sudden, painful flare of envy caught me by surprise. I was a loner, my last few years in school. I could have done with a friend like that.
Tana French
No matter how hard Evil tries, it can never quite match up to the power of Good, because Evil is ultimately self-destructive. Evil may set out to corrupt others, but in the process corrupts itself. That's just the way Evil is. All things considered, it's better to be on the side of Good, even if Evil occasionally has nicer uniforms.
John Connolly
Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?
Oscar Wilde
But I can now understand why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's ok to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings, the book closes, and I'm plunged back into reality.
Cecelia Ahern