Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 18

It was winter, and a night of bitter cold. The snow lay thick upon the ground, and upon the branches of the trees: the frost kept snapping the little twigs on either side of them, as they passed: and when they came to the Mountain-Torrent she was hanging motionless in air, for the Ice-King had kissed her.
Oscar Wilde
I know that no matter how lonely I get, I'll never be truly alone again. Our loved ones don't leave us. They just move out of sight for a while, and wait...in the shades.
Darren Shan
Music, oh, how faint, how weak,Language fades before thy spell!Why should Feeling ever speak,When thou canst breathe her soul so well?
Thomas Moore
Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child.
Iris Murdoch
A great sea fog is not homogenous--its density varies: it is honeycombed with streets, it has its caves of clear air, its cliffs of solid vapour, all shifting and changing place with the subtlety of legerdemain.
Henry de Vere Stacpoole
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
Grey morning dulled the bay. Banks of clouds, Howth just one more bank, rolled to sea, where other Howths grumbled to greet them. Swollen spumeless tide. Heads that bobbed like floating gulls and gulls that floating bobbed like heads. Two heads. At swim, two boys.
Jamie O'Neill
I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.
Bram Stoker
The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.
James Joyce
Three quarks for Muster Mark!
James Joyce
In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thing like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.
Emma Donoghue
I know what dissipate means, Arty. I'm not three, for heaven's sake.
Eoin Colfer
All we’re trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.
Eamon Grennan
Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.
Samuel Beckett
It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments
Seán MacStíofáin
We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.
Iris Murdoch
She sees tall, sensible Eleanor sitting out on a terrace at twilight, with bats circling above her head. She sees the Pargiter family rising and falling through the decades like swimmers battling the waves.’Summer Lies Bleeding
Nuala Casey
When I look back all is flux, without beginning and flowing towards no end, or none that I shall experience, except as a final full stop. The items of flotsam that I choose to salvage from the general wreckage—and what is a life but a gradual shipwreck?—may take on an aspect of inevitability when I put them on display in their glass showcases, but they are random; representative, perhaps, perhaps compellingly so, but random nonetheless.
John Banville
It is a great wonderHow Almighty God in his magnificenceFavors our race with rank and scopeAnd the gift of wisdom; His sway is wide.Sometimes He allows the mind of a manOf distinguished birth to follow its bent,Grants him fulfillment and felicity on earth And forts to command in his own country.He permits him to lord it in many landsUntil the man in his unthinkingnessForgets that it will ever end for him.He indulges his desires; illness and old ageMean nothing to him; his mind is untroubledBy envy or malice or thought of enemiesWith their hate-honed swords. The whole worldConforms to his will, he is kept from the worstUntil an element of overweening Enters him and takes holdWhile the soul’s guard, its sentry, drowses,Grown too distracted. A killer stalks him,An archer who draws a deadly bow.And then the man is hit in the heart,The arrow flies beneath his defenses,The devious promptings of the demon start.His old possessions seem paltry to him now.He covets and resents; dishonors customAnd bestows no gold; and because of good things That the Heavenly powers gave him in the pastHe ignores the shape of things to come.Then finally the end arrivesWhen the body he was lent collapses and fallsPrey to its death; ancestral possessionsAnd the goods he hoarded and inherited by anotherWho lets them go with a liberal hand.“O flower of warriors, beware of that trap.Choose, dear Beowulf, the better part,Eternal rewards. Do not give way to pride. For a brief while your strength is in bloomBut it fades quickly; and soon there will followIllness or the sword to lay you low,Or a sudden fire or surge of waterOr jabbing blade or javelin from the airOr repellent age. Your piercing eyeWill dim and darken; and death will arrive,Dear warrior, to sweep you away.
Seamus Heaney
But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.
Iris Murdoch
As yet we know nothing of what goes to create or evoke the active spark of life.
Bram Stoker
Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid.Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd.
Oscar Wilde
I have always thought foreigners with their unusual skin colours, mad languages and ignorant customs absolutely hilarious, and I think it's a shame that in recent years its become unfashionable to poke fun at them. I certainly don't think they themselves ever minded it.
Arthur Mathews
I'm miles from where you areI lay down on the cold groundAnd I, I pray that something picks me upAnd sets me down in your warm arms.
Snow Patrol
The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.
Colum McCann
I’d stare up at the sky, reminding myself that Caleb and I were both underneath it. That wherever he was, whatever he was doing, we would always share something.
Anna Carey
We are different, my friend. We are visionaries. A monkey looks up and sees and banana, and that is as far as he looks. But a visionary looks up and sees the moon.
Eoin Colfer
But don't they say that all is fair in love and war? I heard that somewhere.""'They?' Who are 'they?'""I don't know. Just people.""That's what the victorious claim, not the defeated; the powerful, not the powerless. 'All is fair.' 'The end justifies the means.' Is that what you believe?
John Connolly
Right, well, we've got to work out what we need. We've got to work out what we need, how we get it, and what we need to get to get what we need.
Derek Landy
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw
...we have seen that the priests regard the state as an enemy to be exploited, it is only natural that our politicians do likewise. Thus, although patriotism is held in greater esteem in this country than in any other country in the world, there is no other country in the world where patriotism is less in evidence among politicians and among the general mass of the community. For patriotism and the state are so closely allied that love of one is necessarily love of the other. And if any man considers the state an enemy and an institution to be exploited, it follows naturally that he is no patriot. Thus the amazed tourist will see that it is very fashionable for Irish politicians who are not in the government to denounce the government and then when they get into the government it is equally fashionable for them to use the powers of government for the purpose of robbing the country.
Liam O'Flaherty
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious
Oscar Wilde
Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.
Joseph O'Neill
Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day.
Oscar Wilde
For the yesterdays and todays, and the tomorrows I can hardly wait for - Thank you.
Cecelia Ahern
Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.
Oscar Wilde
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
Oscar Wilde
A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself.
George Bernard Shaw
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde
They say ol’ man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He’s the sort of man who knows the only things worth doing are the things might break your heart.
Colum McCann
... desperate times required judicious risk-taking.
Eoin Colfer
A lot of the world seems to repeat itself
Emma Donoghue
Do the things that you always wanted to, without me there to hold you back, don't think just do, more than anything I want to see you go, take a glorious bite out of the whole world
Snow Patrol
Some donkeys have amazing luck.
George Bernard Shaw
Lucky people should hide. Pray the days of wrath do not visit their home.
Josephine Hart
In the same way that the stewards on the Titanic were more concerned about the unemptied ashtrays on the bar than the enormous hole in the side of the ship which was letting in zillions of gallons of water, I too was worrying about the unimportant and ignoring the vital. Sometimes it's easier that way. Because although there was little I could do about the huge hole, it was within my power to empty an asthray.
Marian Keyes
I should have learned mindfulness, and it’s too late now because it’s no good learning it when you’re already in crisis: you have to start when things are good. But only the very, very oddest would think, Hey, my life is perfect. I know! I’ll sit and waste twenty minutes Observing My Thoughts without Judgement.
Marian Keyes
Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?
Oscar Wilde
Hark,” he said, his tone very dry. “What stone through yonder window breaks?”Kami yelled up at him, “It is the east, and Juliet is a jerk!
Sarah Rees Brennan
A condensed Shakespeare with all of the dull parts removed, leaving only the great moments of drama: ghosts, and bloodied daggers, and dying kings.
John Connolly
Werewolves and silver bullets!” Shakespeare coughed a quick laugh and shook his head. “Lord, what fools these mortals be!
Michael Scott
For Dickinson as part of a middle-class community anxious about female creativity, self-assertion, self-expression, and egoism, Shakespeare and Stratford may have been emblems appropriate to her own task as a writer: to achieve literary renown but also authorial disappearance.
Paraic Finnerty
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
Surely some revelation is at hand.
W.B. Yeats
Love ... was part imagination, its web spun as much in the dark lonely separated evenings of longing as in the shared times together.
Niall Williams
We live in our desires rather than in our achievements
George Moore
That’s what it takes to be a hero, a little gem of innocence inside you that makes you want to believe that there still exists a right and wrong, that decency will somehow triumph in the end.
Lise Hand
Photography is an itch that wont go away. No matter how much you scratch it.
Dara McGrath
When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckettas told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett
Samuel Beckett
Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.
Frank McCourt