Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 16

His abhorrence and fear of alcohol did not extend to his power as host. He kept a huge cupboard of drinks in the station house and loved to serve large measures to visiting relatives--especially those he disliked--about which there was a definite element of spreading bait for garden snails.
John McGahern
It's too warm for red wine; now I mix gin and tonics instead. I find they make the ordinary sensation of living lighter, less ruffled.
Sara Baume
The most dangerous drink is gin. You have to be really, really careful with that. And you also have to be 45, female and sitting on the stairs. Because gin isn't really a drink, it's more a mascara thinner. "Nobody likes my shoes!" "I made... I made fifty... fucking vol-au-vents, and not one of you... not one of you... said 'Thank you.'" And my favourite: "Everybody, shut up. Shut up! This song is all about me.
Dylan Moran
Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.
Oscar Wilde
The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.
James Joyce
Bosie has insisted on stopping here for sandwiches. He is quite like a narcissus -- so white and gold. I will come either Wednesday or Thursday night to your rooms. Send me a line. Bosie is so tired: he lies like a hyacinth on the sofa, and I worship him. (letter from Oscar Wilde, 1892 - quoted from Love in a dark time by Colm Toibin)
Oscar Wilde
Yorkshire had none of the color I'd known in Cape Town- the vivid pinks and purples of the freesias and arum lilies in the flower sellers' baskets. Yorkshire had none of the fragrant floral perfume, or the tang of salt in the air from the ocean.
Hazel Gaynor
They appeared to me like a thin veil of mist, translucent, almost- not quite there. But for all their misty peculiarity, they were as clear to me as the minnows in the shallows and the foxgloves on the riverbank and the butterflies fanning their wings. They flitted from flower to flower, as swift as dragonflies, sometimes glowing brightly like a candle flame suddenly catching, sometimes fading like a breath of warm air on glass, so that you would never know they had been there at all. Yet there they were. And there I was, watching them.
Hazel Gaynor
If good men pretend to be villains, how is anybody supposed to know the difference between them?
Sarah Rees Brennan
I used to think this was all about good and evil,” said Rickett, “but it’s not.”“No?”“There’s a kind of evil that isn’t even in opposition to good, because good is an irrelevance to it. It’s a foulness that’s right at the heart of existence, born with the stuff of the universe. It’s in the decay to which all things tend. It is, and it always will be, but in dying we leave it behind.”“And while we’re alive?”“We set our souls against it, and our saints and angels, too.” He patted Parker on the shoulder. “Especially the destroying ones.
John Connolly
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
a grin that wasn't natural, and that combined in a strange way affection and arrogance, the arrogance of the idealist who doesn't realize how easily he can be fooled.
Frank O'Connor
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the
Edmund Burke
I was the ref. I was the ref they didn’t know about. Deaf and dumb. Invisible as a wall. I wanted no one to win
Roddy Doyle
A lonely impulse of delight
W.B. Yeats
I was out of sorts. They are deep, my sorts, a deep ditch, and I am not often out of them.
Samuel Beckett
Why do you want to do this?" he asked curiously. "Why is this woman so important to you?"Saint-Germain blinked in surprise. "Have you ever loved anyone?" he asked."Yes," Tamnuz said cautiously, "I had a consort once, Inanna...""But did you love her? Truly love her?"The Green Man remained silent."Did she mean more to you than life itself?" Saint-Germain persisted."They do not love that do not show their love," Shakespeare murmured very softly.The French immortal stepped closer to the Elder. "I love my Jeanne," he said simply. "I must go to her.""Even though it will cost you everything?" Tamnuz persisted, as if the idea was incomprehensible."Yes. Without Joan, everything I have is worthless.""Even your immortality?""Especially my immortality." Gone were the banter and the jokes. This was a Saint-Germain whom neither Shakespeare nor Palamedes had ever seen before. "I love her," he said,
Michael Scott
Even that. What is the point in living forever, if it is not with the woman I love?
Michael Scott
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
It’s a full-time job being homeless. It’s a full-time job being poor.
John Connolly
So the swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets...
Oscar Wilde
The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface.[Alluding to Joseph Priestley's Observations on Air]
Edmund Burke
Oscar’s hobby was saving people. He used to save people all the time, and fix things that were broken and catch people when they were falling. It wasn’t a skill you’d immediately know about or notice. Stevie said that Oscar had a gift and the gift was that he could smell things you wouldn’t imagine would smell of anything- things like sadness and desperation. Things like far and hopelessness.He never made a big deal about it, but he was quiet and confident – and when you believe in own abilities, you are much more likely to be always ready to act on them, which Oscar always was. Whenever I asked him about it, he claimed that his were not exceptional or extraordinary abilities in the slightest. Everyone, he said, is able to tell when someone is in need of help, but few people really take the time to listen to their instincts, and that, he said, was the only difference between him and a lot of other of people.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
I could feel something that I hadn’t felt for a long time. Something quiet and difficult to spot, but it was the feeling that you get when someone is listening to you. Really listening carefully. And it makes you want to tell things exactly the right way. It makes you want to take your time and explain, and get it right.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.
George Bernard Shaw
I kind of thought actually that Trevor was gone completely mental when he called up here a few weeks ago. Like, why would he not text or email or Facebook? What's with all the reality, I thought. Does he not know he's a million times cooler in virtual form?
Donal Ryan
I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know.
Niall Williams
Some guys get fifteen years, others get life.So death for Edbut not for everyone.Cos it all depends on who you kill and where you kill them too.Like,don't shoot a white cop in Walker Country, Texas. If that's your plan, do it in Arlington, New York- no needles of electric chairs there.Just doesn't seen fair to me.
Sarah Crossan
There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.
Oscar Wilde
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
CHARTERIS [unfolding his arms in terror] No, please. Dont. As a philosopher, it’s my business to tell other people the truth; but it’s not their business to tell it to me. I dont like it: it hurts.
George Bernard Shaw
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
Iris Murdoch
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
Oscar Wilde
And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.
Oscar Wilde
Niagara ... is the first disappointment in the married life of many Americans who spend their honeymoon there.
Oscar Wilde
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
W.B. Yeats
Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
George Bernard Shaw
For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.
Oscar Wilde
... ongoing care for the soul rather than seek for a cure appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life.I sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel.To approach this paradoxial point of tension where adjustment and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of our mystery-filled, star-born nature.It is a beast this thing that stirs in the core of our being, but it is also the star of our innermost nature.We have to care for this suffering with extreme reverence so that in our fear and anger at the beast, we do not overlock the star.~Thomas Moore *Care of the Soul*
Thomas Moore
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
Oscar Wilde
Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
Oscar Wilde
The whiskey kicked like a mugger.
Ken Bruen
So this is the boom, eh?” I said. “Not exactly Scott Fitzgerald, is it?” “I’ll tell you what it’s like,” he said glumly. “It’s like being in Caligula’s Rome, and everyone around you’s having an orgy, and you’re the mug stuck looking after the horse.” He pulled heavily on his cigarette. “The whole thing’ll come crashing down,” he said bleakly, “and all anyone’ll have done is eaten a lot of expensive cheese.
Paul Murray
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
When did we all become fluent in this language that none of us wanted to learn?
Louise O'Neill
I’d begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.
Mark O'Connell
This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins.
Sara Baume
What's this?" he inquired, none too pleasantly. "A circus?""No, Julius. It's the end of the circus.""I see. And these are the clowns?"Foaly's head poked through the doorway."Pardon me for interrupting your extended circus metaphor, but what the hell is that?
Eoin Colfer
The culture of the Epic Fail, in its rituals of comic sacrifice, is a culture of sublimated predation.
Mark O'Connell
Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach, police grammar on the Internet.
Ruadhán J. McElroy
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
Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that
Oscar Wilde
Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly.
Oscar Wilde
Damn it all, MacMurrough, are you telling me you are an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort?’‘If you mean am I Irish, the answer is yes.
Jamie O'Neill
Do you want to kill his love for you? What sort of existence will he have if you rob him of the fruits of his ambition, if you take him from the splendour of a great political career, if you close the doors of public life against him, if you condemn him to sterile failure, he who was made for triumph and success? Women are not meant to judge us but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission. Why should you scourge him with rods for a sin done in his youth, before he knew you, before he knew himself? A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A women's life revolves around curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that man's life progresses. Don't make any terrible mistake, Lady Chiltern. A woman who can keep a man's love, and love him in return, has done all the world wants of women, or should want of them.
Oscar Wilde
The pure and simple truth is, the truth is never pure and simple.
Oscar Wilde
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Oscar Wilde
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.Vice and virtue are the artist’s materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feelings, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectators, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Oscar Wilde
He was a man of most subtle and refined intellect. A man of culture, charm, and distinction. One of the most intellectual men I ever met.""I prefer a gentlemanly fool any day. There is more to be said for stupidity than people imagine. Personally I have a great admiration for stupidity. It is a sort of fellow-feeling, I suppose.
Oscar Wilde
the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failure. a
Oscar Wilde