Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 23

I quite enjoy the lines on my forehead because they show my life. That’s my history and I like to see that in other people. Like this wrinkle is due to some girl who broke my heart. I don’t want to escape it in any way.
Michael Fassbender
I don't want to see him alone. He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice.
Oscar Wilde
The years are going by us like huge birds, whom Doom and Destiny and the schemes of God have frightened up out of some old gray marsh.
Lord Dunsany
My fiftieth year had come and gone,I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazedMy body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or lessIt seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless.
W.B. Yeats
I think: by the time I'm old, nobody will be able to die any more.
Sara Baume
But now I remember, of course, I'm never going to be old.
Sara Baume
Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.
John Banville
Before forty, you think that exhaustion is something like a long-lasting hangover. But at forty you learn all about it. Even your passions exhaust you.
Kevin Barry
You don't stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.
George Bernard Shaw
Wisdom comes with winters
Oscar Wilde
And we all know how ladies get minks . . .”Popsy and Sandra chorused the answer together. “The same way minks get minks!
Suzy Duffy
They said her duck recipe and the Chinese music were so dramatic everything else sounded anemic.
Frank McCourt
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does NOT triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
George Bernard Shaw
Modesty seldom resides in a breast that is not enriched with nobler virtues.
Oliver Goldsmith
All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.
Oscar Wilde
Always she had sounded sympathetic, always she had appeared to understand. But inside there was a bit of her that said that they couldn't have tried hard enough. If Celia had a daughter who was desperately unhappy at school and who had lost four stone in weight, she wouldn't hang around --she'd try to cope with it. If she had a father who couldn't cope she'd have him to live with her. Only now was she beginning to realize that it was not to be so simple. People had minds of their own. And her mother's mind was like a hermetically sealed box in a vault of a bank.
Maeve Binchy
You've recognised a fundamental feature of an addict's life. Maintaining your habit is so important you've no real interest in anything else.
Marian Keyes
In contrast we let go of existence, meaning, and the sublime as categories to describe the object “God.” Instead these become ways in which we engage with the world. Yet, as we affirm the world in love, we indirectly sense that in letting go of God we have, in fact, found ourselves at the very threshold of God.
Peter Rollins
Seen no matter how and said as seen. Dread of black. Of white. Of void. Let her vanish. And the rest. For good.
Samuel Beckett
Guilt is a self-indulgence.
Marian Keyes
more guilt, guilt, guilt. That's the Irish condition.
Adrian McKinty
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
Oscar Wilde
There is no moral to my song,I praise no right, I blame no wrong;I tell of things that I have seen,I show the man that I have beenAs simply as a poet canWho knows himself poet and man.
Thomas MacDonagh
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
Embrace death, dance with it a while, and finally fall prey to it.
Darren Shan
Men so sick they are dying of death.
Sebastian Barry
It is in the nature of things to be drawn to the very experiences that will spoil our innocence, transform our lives, and give us necessary complexity and depth.
Thomas Moore
SpringThe season between winter and summer, comprising in the Northern Hemispherethe months March, April and May.The ability of something to return to its original shape when it is pressed down, stretched or twisted.
Cecelia Ahern
SummerThe seasons between spring and autumn, comprising in the Northern Hemispherethe warmest months of the year: June, July and August. The period of finest development, perfection, or beauty previous to any decline; the summer of life.
Cecelia Ahern
SummerThe seasons between spring and autumn, comprising in the Northern Hemispherethe warmest months of the year: June, July and August. The period of finest development, perfection, or beauty previous to any decline; the summer of life.― Cecilia Ahern
Cecilia Ahern
AutumnThe season between summer and winter, comprising in the Northern Hemisphereusually the months of September, October and November.A period of maturity.
Cecelia Ahern
WinterThe season between autumn and spring, comprising in the Northern Hemisphere the coldest months of the year: December, January and February.A period of inactivity or decay.
Cecelia Ahern
If cats could count, they’d start getting nervous around the time they put paid to their fifth life.
John Connolly
The man who will not defend the honour of his cat cannot be trusted to defend anything.
Robert Lynd
A cat is only technically an animal, being divine.
Robert Lynd
To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
Oscar Wilde
Each imagining himself to be the first last and only alone, whereas he is neither first last nor last nor only not alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.
James Joyce
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
Oscar Wilde
The well bred contradict other people. the wise contradict themselves.
Oscar Wilde
How can she? She's incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?
George Bernard Shaw
Portia followed after, a smirk on her face, and Syc hissed as he passed.Donegan waited till they were gone, then swung round to Gracious."He hissed at me.""He hissed at you.""Should I hiss back?""It's a bit late.""He could still hear.""Not unless you run after him.""Do you think I should?""Probably not.""I think I should.""It'd be a bit weird.""You might be right." Donegan pursed his lips, then shook his fist at the doorway."That showed him," said Gracious.Donegan nodded. "He'll think twice about hissing at me again.
Derek Landy
What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.
George Bernard Shaw
I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.
Oscar Wilde
With gas cookers and chip pans in every kitchen, the chip-pan fire was by far the most popular method these Proddies had for burning their houses down. The second technique was the ever popular chimney fire and number three had to be the drunken cigarette drop on the carpet. Mind you, why they'd be cooking chips at this hour was anyone's guess.
Adrian McKinty
I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.
Tana French
My eyes were closed, they're open now
Damien Rice
Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--''Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.
Iris Murdoch
And you’ll miss me more as the narrowing weeks wing by. Someday duly, oneday truly, twosday newly, till whensday.
James Joyce
And Nurd, who had never had a mother and father, and who had never loved or been loved, marvelled at the ways in which feeling so wonderful could also leave one open to so much pain. In a strange way, he envied Samuel even that. He wanted to care about someone so much that it could hurt.
John Connolly
But with your life you make a few bad decisions, get unlucky a few times, whatever, but you have to keep going, right?
Cecelia Ahern
Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was non ov those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.
Colum McCann
That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!
Iris Murdoch
Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.
George Bernard Shaw
Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
Malachy McCourt
The hunger inside us must be fed to be controlled.
Darren Shan
My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.
Oscar Wilde
And when in doubt, Josh, follow your heart. Words can be false, images and sounds can be manipulated. But this... This is always true.
Michael Scott
I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible.
Joseph O'Neill
Fairy tales are such evil little stories for young children.
Cecelia Ahern
All men are mad in some way or another, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen too, the rest of the world.
Bram Stoker