Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 8

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.
George Bernard Shaw
Everything worth knowing about the 1980s I learned from obsessively reading Bloom County collections when I was nine and Derek Jarman's diaries when I was twenty.
Ruadhán J. McElroy
Blending into the tinctures and textures of the countryside. The tree which falls without any human hearing still falls, as the creatures who die without being found by a human still die.
Sara Baume
Other men look up and down, left and right; but men like us are different. We are visionaries.
Eoin Colfer
I dream dark dreams. I dream of a figure moving through the forest, of children flying from his path, of young women crying at his coming. I dream of snow and ice, of bare branches and moon-cast shadows. I dream of dancers floating in the air, stepping lightly even in death, and my own pain is but a faint echo of their suffering as I run. My blood is black on the snow, and the edges of the world are silvered with moonlight. I run into the darkness, and he is waiting. I dream in black and white, and I dream of him. I dream of Caleb, who does not exist, and I am afraid.
John Connolly
I don’t mind crack,” I said. “I like crack as much as the next man. But it’s not doing a thing for my nerves, and I already have a splitting headache— I say, I don’t suppose those heroin dealers carry Anadin or acetaminophen or anything like that, do they?” “I think they just have heroin, Charlie.
Paul Murray
A novelist's job is almost to be a stupid as possible, except in the cunning moment when you need to structure something, when you need to be very intelligent indeed. The rest of the time, you need almost an empty mind, where you can let any image in, follow it along, and allow an emotional charge, almost the way actors and singers can work. The more instinct you have as a novelist, and the less intelligence, the better.
Colm Tóibín
Do you believe in destiny? That even the powers of time can be altered for a single purpose? That the luckiest man who walks on this earth is the one who finds… true love?
Bram Stoker
By gnawing through a dyke even a rat may drown a nation.
Edmund Burke
Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.
Oscar Wilde
I think it is true to say only an inferior person has rights. When you hear a person talking about his rights, you may be sure he is trying to gain by dint of shouting something which he lacks ( or had and lost) by reason of some culpable deficiency in himself.
Flann O'Brien
It is what writers do, imagine and feel the pain of others, sometimes at the expense of feeling their own. Here, then, in these pages is mine, the fear of death, of loss, of unexpressed love. Here is the truth told in a story. And in the telling of it perhaps I have found some way to have courage, to believe.
Niall Williams
But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.
Oscar Wilde
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.    To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.      The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Oscar Wilde
My Salome is a mystic the sister of Salammbô a Saint Thérèse who worships the moon.
Oscar Wilde
She looked defeated, a castle stormed, torn down, with no one living inside. She looked like a hollowed-out creature, only shell and no soul.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood
Oscar Wilde
I knew I couldn’t trust my illogical heart, and that meant I had to do everything in my power to stay away from him so I wouldn’t have to.
Catherine Doyle
Knock yourself out... Or rather, don't.
Eoin Colfer
When all is said and done, how do we not know but that our own unreason may be better than another’s truth? for it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey. Come into the world again, wild bees, wild bees!
W.B. Yeats
There was something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance.
Oscar Wilde
What some invent the rest enlarge.
Jonathan Swift
Yesterday was a closed book, tomorrow, however, was another story.
Cecelia Ahern
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Oscar Wilde
Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else. That's what life is after all.
James Joyce
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
Oscar Wilde
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking other people to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde
He likewise directed, “that every senator in the great council of a nation, after he had delivered his opinion, and argued in the defence of it, should be obliged to give his vote directly contrary; because if that were done, the result would infallibly terminate in the good of the public.
Jonathan Swift
How's Alison getting on?'Conway snorted. 'Tucked up in the sick room like she's dying in some season finale. Little fadey voice on her and all. She's having a great old time.
Tana French
How we lavish our money and worship on Shakespeare without in the least knowing why!
George Bernard Shaw
You don't need the help of politicians to be a good teacher, Peter.
Audrey Magee
How do you get on with your father ' Beleth asked.'Very well ' Pyrgus answered loyally although it was far from the truth.'I ate mine ' Beleth told him. 'He got old and feeble and useless but he wanted to hold on to power. So I took steps. Tasted disgusting - stringy tough smelly ... you know how fathers are - but it's the custom here. You're supposed to absorb the essence that way. Rank superstition of course but well ... tradition.
Herbie Brennan
Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself-in fact till it does that it hardly is experience.
Elizabeth Bowen
Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
John Banville
And perhaps there is none, no morrow anymore, for one who has waited so long for it in vain. And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks all look alike. Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fullness of the great deep and unchanging calm. But at long intervals they close, with the gentle suddenness of flesh that tightens, often without anger, and closes on itself.
Samuel Beckett
[C]ontemporary Jesus research is still involved in textual looting, in attacks on the mound of Jesus tradition that do not begin from any overall stratigraphy, do not explain why this or that item was chosen for emphasis over some other one, and give the distinct impression that the researcher knew the result before beginning the search.
John Dominic Crossan
Very few men properly speaking live at present but are providing to live another time.
Jonathan Swift
The Noblest form of Affection
Oscar Wilde
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Oscar Wilde
I always wonder why condescending snarkiness is the chosen method of communication for so many forum users. It seems to me like these things would be much better expressed in non-confrontational, polite manner.
Gavin Dunne
Your guardian angel never, ever stops communicating with you. I feel that at times they should be frustrated with us but they seem to have endless patience and they never ever give up on us.
Lorna Byrne
How you spend your time is more important than how you spend your money. Money mistakes can be corrected, but time is gone forever.
David Norris
When the world has once begun to use us ill, it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore.
Jonathan Swift
Interpretations of interpretations interpreted.
James Joyce
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw
That's what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.
Colum McCann
I am not young enough to know everything.
Oscar Wilde
Give a man health and a course to steer and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.
George Bernard Shaw
Pain's nothing. Pains what you give, not what you get.
Colum McCann
Men never feel quite the same about a woman's body once they know it's done that thing: widened and torn to push out a baby's head.
Emma Donoghue
The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
Oscar Wilde
If you look at life one way there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.
Oscar Wilde
Please just admit it," said Valkyrie. "You're going to miss me, aren't you?" "Obviously," said Skulduggery. "Thank you." "like a drowning man misses the land." "Aw w w..." "Like a hesitant man misses the chance." "Yeah..." "Like an oblivious man misses the point." "I have a feeling you're mocking me somehow, but I can't put my finger on how.
Derek Landy
When one has no design but to speak plain truth he may say a great deal in a very narrow compass.
Richard Steele
I am a drinker with writing problems.
Brendan Behan
The river this November afternoonRests in an equipoise of sun and cloud:A glooming light, a gleaming darkness shroudIts passage. All seems tranquil, all in tune.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Life at times loses its sense of reality; it appears to us like a weird, optical illusion - a phantasmagoric bubble that will disappear at the slightest breath.
Oscar Wilde
The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives.
Oscar Wilde