Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 24

It's a myth that crazy people don't know they're crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about our thoughts than do sane people.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Indeed if one had just seen him at the end of the evening with the dusk and the mist of the fenlands close behind him he might have believed that in the dusk and the mist was an army that followed this gay worn confident man. Had the army been there Niv was sane.Had the world accepted that an army was there, still he was sane. But the lonely fancy that had not fact to feed on, nor the fancy of any other for fellowship, was for its loneliness mad.
Lord Dunsany
I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and that it's the knockings and baterrings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banaility.
Elizabeth Bowen
There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does find us, if we're lucky we're Odysseus tied up to the ship's mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If we're not at all lucky, we're another sort of sailor stepping off the deck to drown in the sea.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
It was the most perfect moment in my life.It was the last perfect moment in my life.
Cecelia Ahern
Perfection is an illusion. Yet perfectionists demand it from others while being far from flawless themselves. The margin of error of the human condition is often our greatest area of excellence and discovery.
Stewart Stafford
The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.
Oscar Wilde
Love doesn't demand perfection, but it does ask you to give yourself with less reserve than you'd prefer.
Thomas Moore
You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his side. Its ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels. My familiar, after me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen! A wavering line along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt bread. Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes.--After all, Haines began ...Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was not all unkind.--After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me.--I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.--Italian? Haines said.A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.--And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.--Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?--The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.--I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph of their brazen bells: ET UNAM SANCTAM CATHOLICAM ET APOSTOLICAM ECCLESIAM: the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars.
James Joyce
I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.
Oscar Wilde
I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas into these articles. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous, subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blashphemous, and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and any one who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages.
George Bernard Shaw
Mrs. Casey, do you love Christmas? Well you know, she answered reflectively, Christmas can be a sad time for people too. It's a remembering time for us older ones. We remember the people who are gone.Oh, I never thought of that, I told her in surprise.Well that's youth for you, she said; you don't start to look back over your shoulder until there is something to look back at, and around Christmas I tend to think of the Christmases past and the people gone with them.
Alice Taylor
I always remember your own grandmother, she continued, nodding her head, old Mrs. Taylor. She died on a Christmas Night.Oh, I said shivering. I wouldn't like to die on a Christmas Night. A good night to die, she smiled; they say that the gates of heaven are open on Christmas Night.
Alice Taylor
In the days approaching Christmas, she always reminds me of the previous year: 'Jane crocheted you an entire poncho, and all you gave her was a bone-shaped beach stone.
Sara Baume
Were I a philosopher, I should write a philosophy of toys, showing that nothing else in life need to be taken seriously, and that Christmas Day in the company of children is one of the few occasions on which men become entirely alive.
Robert Lynd
Come,' he said, 'come, we must see and act. Devils or no devils, or all the devils at once, it matters not; we fight him all the same.
Bram Stoker
Her past is behind her, her future is of little concern. She moves towards the grave, at her own speed.
Anne Enright
But he drank a lot. When love dies, he told me, there are no survivors.
Eion Colfer
[Charlie is dying:]After what seemed a long while, but hadn’t been, Marsh gave Paulette’s hand a warm and caring squeeze. “They’re here for him,” she said.But their heavenly visitors didn’t take him right away. They had to make room for the chaos of modern medical urgencies. To get out of the way of well-trained professionals who had dedicated their lives to holding back Heaven.Choppers are just as noisy and turbulent as we imagine them to be. One tore in over the hills and shattered every bit of peace Charlie otherwise could have lost himself into.In an instant the Med-Evac team was all over him. In the midst of that blatant orchestrated chaos Paulette fought to find her peace, and to hold him inside it.“Hang on, buddy,” techs kept telling him. “Don’t go leaving us now. You just hang in there.”But they didn’t understand, Paulette thought. It was his time.The chopper made a horrible racket carrying him off. Marsh, Paulette, and Ailana held their peace as its winds whipped their world into a froth.Harve’s face twisted with something that might conceivably have been rage.Then, all of a sudden, the birds sang, as though someone had given them a cue. “So that’s what it’s like,” Marsha said, very softly.“The afterlife.“My God, it’s so beautiful.
Edward Fahey
What about you?" he asked, his words not much more than a mumble. "Regrets?""Many," Skuduggery said.Tesseract's breath rattled in his chest. "That's the goo thing about living. You get to make up for past mistakes.""Or make brand-new ones.
Derek Landy
Demons never die quietly, and a week ago the storm was a proper demon, sweeping through the Caribbean after her long ocean crossing from Africa, a category five when she finally came ashore at San Juan before moving on to Santo Domingo and then Cuba and Florida. But now she's grown very old, as her kind measures age, and these are her death throes. So she holds tightly to this night, hanging on with the desperate fury of any dying thing, any dying thing that might once have thought itself invincible.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
I know it does not matter that I do not understand.
Brendan Kennelly
What's seldom is wonderful.
John Connolly
I wish I'd been born with your capacity for wonder. I wouldn't mind living a shorter life if my short life could be as vivid as yours.
Sara Baume
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
Jonathan Swift
I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that the delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it.
Edmund Burke
The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he had been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond our conception in their nature and their multiplicity and their power. God was at least the name of something which we thought was good. Now even the name has gone and the spiritual world is scattered. There is nothing any more to prevent the magnetism of many spirits.
Iris Murdoch
Who're them?" says he to the curate."Them are the fallen angels," says the c
Eddie Lenihan
They were on the side of the angels, even if the angels weren't entirely sure that this was a good thing.
John Connolly
Neither did she realise yet that grief is a kind of glue, too, that the essence of humanity is this empathy, and that we fall together in that moment of tenderest perception when we see and feel each other's wounds and know another's sorrow like a brother of our own.
Niall Williams
He sits in an old armchair in the corner covered with bits of blankets and a bucket behind the chair that stinks enough to make you sick and when you look at that old man in the dark corner you want to get a hose with hot water and strip him and wash him down and give him a big feed of rashers and eggs and mashed potatoes with loads of butter and salt and onions.I want to take the man from the Boer War and the pile of rags in the bed and put them in a big sunny house in the country with birds chirping away outside the window and a stream gurgling.
Frank McCourt
Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.
Seamus Heaney
It's okay to write a cliché in a first draft; it sets a marker that you can get far, far away from in the rewrites.
Stewart Stafford
I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
The reason I like the game chess is because each move has countless repercussions, but you're in charge of them. And it's your ability to see into the future and the effects of the decisions you've made that males you either a good or not a good chess player. It's not luck.
Bono
I had made a decision, although I hardly knew it yet. It's often that way with decisions, they're made in some hidden part of us and the awareness secretes itself slowly into that conscious part of us that imagines it decides.
Neil Jordan
She has gone back to Brooklyn,' her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmire Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years already when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more.
Colm Tóibín
Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.
Lord Dunsany
The aim of life is self-development
Oscar Wilde
Salomé, Salomé, dance for me. I pray thee dance for me. I am sad to-night. Yes, I am passing sad to-night. When I came hither I slipped in blood, which is an evil omen; and I heard, I am sure I heard in the air a beating of wings, a beating of giant wings. I cannot tell what they mean .... I am sad to-night. Therefore dance for me. Dance for me, Salomé, I beseech you. If you dance for me you may ask of me what you will, and I will give it you, even unto the half of my kingdom.
Oscar Wilde
but curiosity is a restless and scrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
The days on which one has been the most inquisitive are among the days on which one has been happiest.
Robert Lynd
Curiosity is the hair of our habit tending to stand on end. It rarely happens that our attention is not stained in greater or lesser degree by this animal element.
Samuel Beckett
I tried to explain again. 'Perhaps it would have been easier if I said that not being able to find something is like suddenly not remembering the words to your favourite song that you knew off by heart. It's like suddenly forgetting the name of someone you know really well and see every day, or the name of a group who sang a famous song. It's something so frustrating that it plays on your mind over and over again because you know there's an answer but no one can tell you it. It niggles and niggles at me and I can't rest until I know the answer.''I Understand,' he said softly.
Cecelia Ahern
Time is your cathedral. You know the present is only a pretty illusion in the minds of men. And I think you know that nothing has ever passed away, not entirely.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Why can't I solve this problem by killing someone? she though petulantly, then comforted herself with the mantra that had kept her going in prison: "Soon all the humans will be dead," she said, droning in the time-honored fashion of gurus everywhere. "And then Opal will be loved."And even if I'm not loved, she thought, at least all the humans will be dead.
Eoin Colfer
Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.
Oscar Wilde
Revenge is what I want. Nothing but pure unadulterated revenge. But my mother brought me up to be a lady.
J.P. Donleavy
If you have to injure someone, then make it so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.
Michael Scott
I don't like it, but my hands are tied. I just want you to know this: if I ever get the chance to betray you, I will. If the opportunity arises to pay you back, I'll take it. You'll never be able to trust me.
Darren Shan
Why did you shoot him?""You weren't around," I replied, my teeth gritted in pain. "If you'd been here I'd have shot you instead.
John Connolly
Do you like him? Ty asked. "Not that I care." "I do," I said, because it was true. Even though it didn't matter anymore. "Not that I care you don't care. Though you clearly do care, and I don't care about that either." "Well, I don't care that you don't care that I don't care. In fact i'm glad. Because, um, if I were seeming someone that I liked, I'd want you to be happy for me.""Are you seeing someone?" I asked, pretty sure he wasn't. "Not that I care.
Sarah Rees Brennan
When a guy says,'I'll call you,' and he doesn't say when-that means he won't call you." Kit pulled his phone out of his pocket and pressed a couple buttons. My phone vibrated in my pocket. I fished it out, smiling. "Madness," Kit whispered softly into his phone. "I meant I'd call you. This is me calling you.
Sarah Rees Brennan
You know what we have to do?"The Italian nodded. "I know.""You don't look too happy about it.""Defacing a beautiful building is a crime.""But killing people is not?" Dee asked."Well, people can always be replaced.
Michael Scott
... With a slight miscalculated leap cleared to the iron picket fence. Put the fear of God into me, picket fences and balls don't mix.
J.P. Donleavy
None of us understood that the body is a connected thing.
Lucy Grealy
People will kill you over time. And how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases like ‘be realistic’.
Dylan Moran
Why be broken when you can be gold?
Sarah Rees Brennan
He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.
Edmund Burke
I mean, wha comfort does pretendin to be a Buddhist or wharrever give him? What's wrong with pretendin to be a Catholic like the rest of us?
Trevor Byrne