Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 20

Now you look here. All your father ever dreamed of for you was to do something you loved in life. He didn't care about fancy qualifications or fancy clothes or cars, just that you were both happy and fulfilled. He was so excited about your dreams for a career.
Hazel Gaynor
There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims....
Oscar Wilde
No, mademoiselle, I would not like to see the children's menu. I have no doubt that the children's menu itself tastes better than the meals on it. I would like to order à la carte. Or don't you serve fish to minors?
Eoin Colfer
Londoners, with their noses pressed to cold windows, smiled, for a mid-summer storm was raging across England. Zues had blessed their land, taking away the bright happy sun and replacing it with gusty winds, lashing rain and utter misery.
Anya Wylde
Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.
Frank McCourt
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
Part of being a conscious human being, is having an intention. And if you put an intention into whatever you do, it’s definitely going to be more satisfying in the end
Daphne Guinness
I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result.
Oscar Wilde
Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.Just as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people.And falsehoods the truths of other people.Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
Oscar Wilde
One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.
Oscar Wilde
The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated.
Oscar Wilde
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Oscar Wilde
Victor Vigny: A monkey glances up and sees a banana, and that's as far as he looks. A visionary looks up and sees the moon.Conor Broekhart: Which resembles a giant banana.
Eoin Colfer
The moon rose up that evening and shot her silver arrows at the house under the artu tree. The house was empty. Then the moon came across the sea and across the reef. She lit the lagoon to it's dark, dim heart. She lit the coral brains and sand spaces, and the fish casting their shadows on the sand and the coral. The keeper of the lagoon rose to greet her, and the fin of him broke her reflection on the mirror-like surface into a thousand glittering ripples. She saw the white staring ribs of the form on the reef. Then, peeping over the trees, she looked down into the valley, where the great stone idol had kept it's solitary vigil for five thousand years, perhaps, and more.At this base, in his shadow, looking as if under his protection, lay two human beings, naked, clasped in each other's arms and fast asleep. One could scarcely pity his vigil, had it been marked sometimes through the years by such an incident as this. The thing had been conducted just as the birds conduct their love affairs. An affair absolutely natural, absolutely blameless and without sin. A marriage according to Nature, without feasts or guests, consummated with accidental cynicism under the shadow of a religion a thousand years dead.
Henry de Vere Stacpoole
The Cat and the Moon The cat went here and thereAnd the moon spun round like a top,And the nearest kin of the moon,The creeping cat, looked up.Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,For, wander and wail as he would,The pure cold light in the skyTroubled his animal blood.Minnaloushe runs in the grassLifting his delicate feet.Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?When two close kindred meet,What better than call a dance?Maybe the moon may learn,Tired of that courtly fashion,A new dance turn.Minnaloushe creeps through the grassFrom moonlit place to place,The sacred moon overheadHas taken a new phase.Does Minnaloushe know that his pupilsWill pass from change to change,And that from round to crescent,From crescent to round they range?Minnaloushe creeps through the grassAlone, important and wise,And lifts to the changing moonHis changing eyes.
W.B. Yeats
The moon in her chariot of pearl
Oscar Wilde
I am more than what they say I am.
John O'Callaghan
People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.
Oscar Wilde
I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.
George Bernard Shaw
Careful, Mr. Spiro, guns are dangerous. Especially the end with the hole.
Eoin Colfer
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
Oscar Wilde
In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait the front pages with second-hand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful enough that you want to stay on their good side.
Tana French
And now he is singing a bard's curse upon you, O brother abbot, and upon your father and your mother, and your grandfather and your grandmother, nd upon all your relations.'Is he cursing in rhyme?'He is cursing in rhyme, and with two assonances in every line of his curse.'("The Crucifixion Of The Outcast")
W.B. Yeats
If Jana had been given to putting her thoughts into words, she might have told Laxmi that without someone to love,there was no reason to live.
Anne McCaffrey
She had not given me the cross to keep the bad men away, as a child might have been expected to do. No, in her mind the bad men could not be kept away. They were coming, and they would have to be faced.
John Connolly
Jealousy, that diseased crow pecking at your heart.
Stewart Stafford
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen
But jealousy is a dreadful thing, Jessica. It is the most natural to us of the really wicked passions and it goes deep and envenoms the soul. It must be resisted with every honest cunning and with the deliberate thinking of generous thoughts, however abstract and empty these may seem in comparison with that wicked strength... There is no merit, Jessica, in a faithfulness which is poison to you and captivity to him.
Iris Murdoch
Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.
George Bernard Shaw
It is generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles and design.
Edmund Burke
His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices.
Oscar Wilde
Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, 'May I come in?' is not true laughter. No! He is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person, he choose no time of suitability. He say, 'I am here.
Bram Stoker
Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, 'May I come in?' is not the true laughter. No! he is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person; he choose no time of suitability. He say, 'I am here.' ... Oh, friend John, it is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles; and yet when King Laugh come he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall - all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. And believe me, friend John, that he is good to come, and kind. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come; and, like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again; and we bear to go on with our labour, what it may be.
Bram Stoker
There is such solace in the mere sight of water. It clothes us delicately in its blowing salt and scent, gossamer items that medicate the poor soul
Sebastian Barry
And there, on that road, that very minute, he started to play - the most lonesome music that them priests ever in their lives heard. It brought water out o' their teeth, so it did.
Eddie Lenihan
I’ll take my Gut over Google any day
Philip McKernan
I knew immediately something was terribly wrong, but you can know that and not allow the thought in your head, at the front of your head. It dances around at the back, where it can't be controlled. But the front of the head is where the pain begins.
Sebastian Barry
Rest your eyes and then read till they fall out of your head.
Frank McCourt
He’s sitting casually at my kitchen table peeling the skin off an applewith a pocket knife, a red apple that he has quite obviously appropriated from my fruit bowl, might I add.
L.H. Cosway
The Celt, and his cromlechs, and his pillar-stones, these will not change much – indeed, it is doubtful if anybody at all changes at any time. In spite of hosts of deniers, and asserters, and wise-men, and professors, the majority still are adverse to sitting down to dine thirteen at a table, or being helped to salt, or walking under a ladder, of seeing a single magpie flirting his chequered tale. There are, of course, children of light who have set their faces against all this, although even a newspaperman, if you entice him into a cemetery at midnight, will believe in phantoms, for everyone is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt, unlike any other, is a visionary without scratching.
W.B. Yeats
you simply couldn't guard yourself against dreams. they attacked late at night when a person was at the most vulnerable.
Kate O'Riordan
I dream of things I know nothing about.
Louise O'Neill
FatherMichael:OK we should get on with this; I don’t want to be late for my 2 o’clock. First I have to ask, is there anyone in here who thinks there is any reason why these two should not be married?LonelyLady:Yes.SureOne:I could give more than one reason.Buttercup:Hell yes.SoOverHim:DON’T DO IT!
Cecelia Ahern
They were both sad that their love had died, but they agreed that there was nothing they could do about it. They would just have to part.
Siobhán Parkinson
In the darkness as we lie side by side John Cole's left hand snakes over under the sheets and takes a hold of my right hand. We listen to the cries of the night revellers outside and hear the horses tramping along the ways. We're holding hands then like lovers who have just met or how we imagine lovers might be in the unknown realm where lovers act as lovers without concealment.
Sebastian Barry
Author? Author? Did you write these legs?''Yes."'Well, I don't like dem. I don't like 'em at all at all. I could ha' writted better legs meself.
Spike Milligan
Crazy people love their Kindles.
Dermot Davis
The big trinity of publishing: mystery, thrillers and romance. If you can combine all three, then it’s a winner’s trifecta and you’ll be rich beyond your dreams.
Dermot Davis
No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him...As for the virtuous poor...they have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very poor pottage.
Oscar Wilde
Don't be led astray into the paths of virtue.
Oscar Wilde
Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion.
Charles Robert Maturin
Labour is blossoming or dancing whereThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
W.B. Yeats
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,How can we know the dancer from the dance?
W.B. Yeats
A couple of hours after Sunset Michael Robartes returned and told me that I would have to learn the steps of an exceedingly antique dance, because before my initiation could be perfected I had to join three times in a magical dance, for rhythm was the wheel of Eternity, on which alone the transient and accidental could be broken, and the spirit set free.
W.B. Yeats
He's at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right toe knowing the left knee, the height, the depth, the form, the control, the twist of his wrist, the bend of his elbow, the tilt of his neck, notes digging into arteries, and he is in the air now, forcing the legs up beyond muscular memory, one last press of the thighs, an elongation of form, a loosening of human contour, he goes higher and is skyheld.
Colum McCann
[L]uxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience. (Ancillary Justice)
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Some people just needed to be stolen from.
Eoin Colfer
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.
Oscar Wilde
And Beauty is a form of Genius - is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation.
Oscar Wilde
I... I don't, I don't think I can do this.""Do what?"It didn't answer."Do the tests?""I can't work with you when you're like this!" it blurted. "To every one of my specimens, I am the last thing they see! Terrror is what I am used to-- terror is what I like! I prefer my subjects to scream and beg, not ask to see results!""I'll scream my questions, if that helps.""It won't," it said sadly. "I'll know you're only trying to make me feel better.
Derek Landy