Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 9

I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.
Iris Murdoch
It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul.
Niall Williams
Stop thinking of yourself as a victim. You were a target that is now no longer being hit.
Thomas Sheridan
Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.
George Bernard Shaw
If she had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without even having to think about it; but I couldn't forgive her for being hurt.
Tana French
The play was a great success but the audience was a disaster.
Oscar Wilde
I love stories with a happy ending,” Inspector Me said.
Derek Landy
I heard Dominic practice Bronagh’s breathing tactics, and I wondered if I’d be taking care of him in the delivery ward as well as her.“I feel like I’m about to pass out.”Yep, I’m definitely going to be looking after him.“Keep breathing, you’ll be fine,” I assured him. “Where’s me sister?”“Why’re you telling Dominic to breathe?’Ryder murmured.“He’s freakin’ out,” I whispered in response making him snicker.
L.A. Casey
Virtue consists not in abstaining from vice but in not desiring it.
George Bernard Shaw
I need some space.""Because of my past?""No, because of mine. When I'm around you I feel like I'm falling. I need to stop before I smash into the ground.""Are you always so honest?""No. Mostly I'm a liar like you.
Anna McPartlin
But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk of the edge of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone's mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else's hands, so it won't weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.
Tana French
It is terrible to be an unprotected being.
Colm Tóibín
A phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
W.B. Yeats
Society is indeed a contract ... it becomes a participant not only between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
Edmund Burke
The pure and simple truth is, the truth is never pure and simple.
Oscar Wilde
I felt the protective dam I'd built around my heart began to crumble. I turned my eyes back to him and felt the love finally start to trickle out through the fissures. And hoped that one day it would become a torrent.
Lucinda Riley
Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
Oscar Wilde
[Letter to William Ward, 11 July 1878]Dear Boy, Why don’t you write to me? I don’t know what has become of you.As for me I am ruined. The law suit is going against me and I am afraid I will have to pay costs, which means leaving Oxford and doing some horrid work to earn bread. The world is too much for me.However, I have seen Greece and had some golden days of youth. I go back to Oxford immediately for viva voce and then think of rowing up the river to town with Frank Miles. Will you come? YoursOscar
Oscar Wilde
A lot of the world seems to repeat itself
Emma Donoghue
But Pescatore wasn’t leading a seminar on the morality of abortion. She wanted the jury to focus on the legal requirements for abortion providers in Pennsylvania. “The number one thing is the twenty-four-hour waiting period,” she told them. “It’s not like you can walk in and say, ‘I want an abortion,’ and you get it. A woman has a right to go in and be counseled before she has an abortion.” But Gosnell had flatly ignored the twenty-four-hour waiting period. He ignored the law, Pescatore said, out of simple greed. “Money. That was the only law that Dr. Gosnell knew,” she said. “You went to 3801 Lancaster Avenue where no laws were followed. None, zero.” The facts would show that Gosnell didn’t do “normal, legal abortions” largely because it was both cheaper and easier for him to induce labor, wait for the woman to give birth, and then kill the baby outside of the womb with scissors.
Ann McElhinney
There are certain things we owe our little sisters.
Claire Hennessy
The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is how high you raise your foot.
Benny Lewis
Some people just needed to be stolen from.
Eoin Colfer
To gain that which is worth having,it may be necessary to lose everything else.
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
If mankind's destined to bite the bullet, let's bite it and be damned.
Darren Shan
As for dying, he didn't believe that he was frightened of it: the manner of it, perhaps, but not the fact of it. After all, he had reached an age where dying had started to become an objective reality instead of an abstract concept.
John Connolly
He's crazy," Bruno said, twirling a finger in circles around the side of his head and whistling to indicate just how crazy he thought he was. "He went up to a cat on the street the other day and invited her over for afternoon tea." "What did the cat say?" asked Gretel, who was making a sandwich in the corner of the kitchen. "Nothing." explained Bruno. "It was a cat.
John Boyne
I wanted to do this properly, but I look at you and I forget...
Abby Green
The smell of hot popcorn drifted upward from the concourse below, lingering in the warm Californian air like an atmospheric irony, and a Jumbotron directly in front of me displayed a blandly handsome announcer seated behind a curved desk emblazoned with DARPA’s logo: a sports broadcast mise-en-scène from some speculative future, vaguely fascist, in which the machinery of national defense had become a spectacle of mass entertainment.
Mark O'Connell
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted when you find it taken for granted you are unnerved.
Elizabeth Bowen
She noticed then that Conor was watching her.'Are you going for a swim?' he asked her.'In a while. Why don't you go down and check if it's warm enough?''And if it's not warm enough?''We'll still go in. But at least we'll know.
Colm Tóibín
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
Oscar Wilde
Is there a word for adults when they aren't parents?"Steppa laughs. "Folks with other things to do?""Like what things?""Jobs, I guess. Friends. Trips. Hobbies.
Emma Donoghue
Stop asking God to bless what you're doing. Find out what God's doing. It's already blessed.
Bono
I could wish to spy the nakedness of their hearts, and through the different disguises of customs, climates, and religion, find out what is good in them, to fashion my own by. It is for this reason that I have not seen the Palais Royal - nor the facade of the Louvre - nor have attempted to swell the catalogues we have of pictures, statues, and churches - I conceive every fair being as a temple, and would rather enter in, and see the original drawings and loose sketches hung up in it, than the Transfiguration of Raphael itself.
Laurence Sterne
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
W.B. Yeats
Samuel understood at last why this being hated men and women so much: he hated them because they were so like himself, because the worst of the was mirrored in them. He was the source of all that was bad in men and women, but he had none of the greatness, and none of the grace, of which human beings were capable, so that by only by corrupting them was his own pain diminished, and thus his existence made more tolerable.
John Connolly
I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us. A personal experience has intensified rather than diminished that idea.
Bram Stoker
I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.
Oscar Wilde
...the more I felt that perhaps believing in fairies was more important than seeing them. In seeing, there is often question and doubt.
Hazel Gaynor
So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
Iris Murdoch
There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.
Lady Marguerite Blessington
Faith is blind belief. Atheism is blind disbelief. No one has all the information needed to take up such fixed positions.
Stewart Stafford
Everyone's future is in reality uncertain and full of unknown treasures from which all may draw unguessed prizes.
Lord Dunsany
Fight only in direst needNot for lust or petty greedHonor those that do give birthRespect them well for their full worth
Anne McCaffrey
I heard the little bird say so.
Jonathan Swift
As I’ve said before, “the Mod generation”, contrary to popular belief, was not born in even 1958, but in the 1920s after a steady gestation from about 1917 or so. Now, Mod certainly came of age, fully sure of itself by 1958, completely misunderstood by 1963, and in a perpetual cycle of reinvention and rediscovery of itself by 1967 and 1975, respectively, but it was born in the 1920s, and I will maintain this. I don’t care who disagrees with me, and there are dozens of reasons that I do so —from the Art Deco aesthetic, to flapper fashions (complete with bobbed hair), to androgyny and subtle effeminacy, to jazz.
Ruadhán J. McElroy
I can resist everything except temptation.
Oscar Wilde
People don't tend to employ me. I'm the wrong personality type. Or rather, people do tend to employ me for a short time and then they sack me. A film broker once told me, as she terminated my contract, that I have a misleading sort of face. "You're pretty", she complained. "Your features are symmetrical and there was an article in Grazia that says human beings are programmed to find those with symmetrical features more pleasing to they eye. So this isn't my fault, I was simply responding to a biological imperative. You've even teeth, so when you smile, you look...sweet, I suppose. But you're not, are you?""I hope not," I said."You see, there you go again. You're a smart-arse and you've no ability to filter your thoughts---""And my thoughts are often abrasive.""Exactly.""I'll just get my brushes and sponges and leave.""If you would.
Marian Keyes
History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.
Edmund Burke
It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Edmund Burke
If you're good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.
Tana French
My mind couldn't fit itself around the shape of his absence.
Lia Mills
Roseanne, Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self, would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me?
Sebastian Barry
What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattery.
George Bernard Shaw
Happiness is the anticipation of future happines.
Anna Carey
Science knows it doesn't know everything; otherwise, it'd stop. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.
Dara Ó Briain
The control of your mind is most important, and it will be worth your while. You must think deeply. Clear your mind of all bad, unwanted thoughts
William O'Brien
The effect on Lucy was not bad, for the faint seemed to merge subtly into the narcotic sleep. It was with a feeling of personal pride that I could see a faint tinge of colour steal back into the pallid cheeks and lips. No man knows, till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own lifeblood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves.The Professor watched me critically. "That will do," he said. "Already?" I remonstrated. "You took a great deal more from Art." To which he smiled a sad sort of smile as he replied, "He is her lover, her fiance. You have work, much work to do for her and for others, and the present will suffice.
Bram Stoker