Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 25

Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother’s prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.
James Joyce
As long as you're around, your life is too. So just as you shower love and affection and attention on the husbands, wives, parents, children and forever friends who surround you, you have to do so equally with your life, because it's yours, it's you, and it's always there rooting for you, cheering you on, even when you feel like you can't do it. I gave up on my life for a while, but what I've learned is that even when that happens and especially when that happens, life never gives up on you. Mine didn't. And we'll be there for each other until those final moments when we will look at each other and say, 'Thanks for staying until the end.'And that's the truth.
Cecelia Ahern
To Nature nothing can be added; from Nature nothing can be taken away; the sum of her energies is constant, and the utmost man can do in the pursuit of physical truth, or in the applications of physical knowledge, is to shift the constituents of the never-varying total. The law of conservation rigidly excludes both creation and annihilation. Waves may change to ripples, and ripples to waves; magnitude may be substituted for number, and number for magnitude; asteroids may aggregate to suns, suns may resolve themselves into florae and faunae, and floras and faunas melt in air: the flux of power is eternally the same. It rolls in music through the ages, and all terrestrial energy—the manifestations of life as well as the display of phenomena—are but the modulations of its rhythm.
John Tyndall
By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.
William Trevor
Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.
Laurence Sterne
I was in doubt, and then everything took a hue of unreality, and I did not know what to trust, even the evidence of my own senses. Not knowing what to trust, I did not know what to do; and so had only to keep on working in what had hitherto been the groove of my life. The groove ceased to avail me, and I mistrusted myself.
Bram Stoker
...The less I think of it the more certain I am.
Samuel Beckett
Do you see the irony at all, Tristan?’ I stare at him and shake my head. He seems determined not to speak again until I do. ‘What irony?’ I ask eventually, the words tumbling out in a hurried heap. ‘That I am to be shot as a coward while you get to live as one.
John Boyne
You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.
Oscar Wilde
Irony is a treacherous servant; unless it's very carefully watched over, it has a tendency to expose the foolishness of its apparent master.
Mark O'Connell
VLADIMIR: Moron!ESTRAGON: Vermin!VLADIMIR: Abortion!ESTRAGON: Morpion!VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!ESTRAGON: Curate!VLADIMIR: C
Samuel Beckett
I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours.
Oscar Wilde
Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt.
George Bernard Shaw
If you really have to get shot, Belfast is one of the best places to do it. After twenty years of the Troubles, and after thousands of assassination attempts and punishment shootings, Belfast has trained many of the best gunshot-trauma surgeons in the world.
Adrian McKinty
The smell of hot popcorn drifted upward from the concourse below, lingering in the warm Californian air like an atmospheric irony, and a Jumbotron directly in front of me displayed a blandly handsome announcer seated behind a curved desk emblazoned with DARPA’s logo: a sports broadcast mise-en-scène from some speculative future, vaguely fascist, in which the machinery of national defense had become a spectacle of mass entertainment.
Mark O'Connell
I recalled with some discomfort that the man driving the vehicle had invented the sport of volcano boarding, presumably as a way of solving, in one deft move, the problems of the insufficient riskiness of both snowboarding and hanging out on the slopes of active volcanoes. Although I was not sure that I wanted to live forever, I was sure that I didn’t want to go down in a blaze of chintzy irony, plunging into a ravine strapped into the passenger seat of a thing called the Immortality Bus.
Mark O'Connell
As learnèd commentators viewIn Homer more than Homer knew.
Jonathan Swift
Irony is wasted on the stupid
Oscar Wilde
Writing is the spectrum through which the chaos of life can be seen, studied and understood.
Stewart Stafford
To work, her dumb lunge says,is to move a certain mass...through a certain distance,is to pull your weight and feelexact and equal to it.Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
Seamus Heaney
The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.
Thomas Moore
He glanced at her, musing on the wonder of a beautiful woman with a disagreeable personality.
J.G. Farrell
And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another.
Samuel Beckett
And I seemed to see myself ageing as swiftly as a day-fly. But the idea of ageing was not exactly the one which offered itself to me. And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always condemned to be.
Samuel Beckett
What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
Oscar Wilde
Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction.
Oscar Wilde
You want useless, you have come to the right guy. I can be useless for hours at a time. Weeks even. I'm currently closing in on a month of being totally useless, which is by way of being a personal best.
Sarah Rees Brennan
That's what you got for being a servant of no ambition: a shrunken life, hung up like a gibbet as a warning to others.
Emma Donoghue
I know what other people think about me,” Rusty told her. “ ‘That Rusty,’ they say. ‘Charming and handsome,’ they say first, of course—they’re not blind. Then they add, ‘All the ambition and drive of a chocolate sundae.’
Sarah Rees Brennan
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
Oscar Wilde
She began stroking my ankles. I considered kicking her in the cunt.
Samuel Beckett
If even a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power, that is the simple sense of the ontological proof. And if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth. What is the truth anyway, that truth? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions. Can you determine exactly what you felt or thought or did?
Iris Murdoch
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.
Oscar Wilde
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking other people to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde
Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on... The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.
Oscar Wilde
A well-adjusted person wouldn't talk much. There's not a lot to be said about most of life. Most days, weeks, years, lives, nothing happens... and still we carry on chattering at each other.
James Ferron Anderson
… in these new days and in these new pages a philosophical tradition of the spontaneity of speculation kind has been rekindled on the sacred isle of Éire, regardless of its creative custodian never having been taught how to freely speculate, how to profoundly question, and how to playfully define. Spontaneity of speculation being synonymous with the philosophical-poetic, the philosophical-poetic with the rural philosopher-poet, and by roundelay the rural philosopher-poet thee with the spontaneity of speculation be. And by the way of the rural what may we say? A philosopher-poet of illimitable space we say. Iohannes Scottus Ériugena the metaphor of old salutes you; salutes your lyrical ear and your skilful strumming of the rippling harp. (Source: Hearing in the Write, Canto 19, Ivy-muffled)
Richard McSweeney
I am afraid of him now. The one I love most in the world.
Neil Jordan
Don't you understand brother? I want to find a love...that will free me from this love...
Neil Jordan
You are intelligent, you are diplomatic, you are beautiful, and you are and always will be...[he kisses her]...MINE...
Neil Jordan
I love stepping back in time
Frances McCarthy
Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.
Colum McCann
Fanfare for the MakersA cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what?To the small fire that never leaves the sky.To the great fire that boils the daily pot.To all the things we are not remembered by,Which we remember and bless. To all the thingsThat will not notice when we die,Yet lend the passing moment words and wings.So fanfare for the Makers: who composeA book of words or deeds who runs may writeAs many who do run, as a family growsAt times like sunflowers turning towards the light.As sometimes in the blackout and the raidsOne joke composed an island in the night.As sometimes one man’s kindness pervadesA room or house or village, as sometimesMerely to tighten screws or sharpen bladesCan catch a meaning, as to hear the chimesAt midnight means to share them, as one manIn old age plants an avenue of limesAnd before they bloom can smell them, before they spanThe road can walk beneath the perfected arch,The merest greenprint when the lives beganOf those who walk there with him, as in defaultOf coffee men grind acorns, as in despiteOf all assaults conscripts counter assault,As mothers sit up late night after nightMoulding a life, as miners day by dayDescend blind shafts, as a boy may flaunt his kiteIn an empty nonchalant sky, as anglers playTheir fish, as workers work and can take prideIn spending sweat before they draw their pay.As horsemen fashion horses while they ride,As climbers climb a peak because it is there,As life can be confirmed even in suicide:To make is such. Let us make. And set the weather fair.Louis Macneice
Louis MacNeice
If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses.
George Bernard Shaw
The Mother Of GodThe threefold terror of love; a fallen flareThrough the hollow of an ear;Wings beating about the room;The terror of all terrors that I boreThe Heavens in my womb.Had I not found content among the showsEvery common woman knows,Chimney corner, garden walk,Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothesAnd gather all the talk?What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,This fallen star my milk sustains,This love that makes my heart's blood stopOr strikes a sudden chill into my bonesAnd bids my hair stand up?
W.B. Yeats
I didn't say any of this to my sister. How I saw her being broken into mediocrity and motherhood; her body broken and then her mind - or did her mind go first, it's sort of hard to disentangle - and then for her to turn around and say Broken is Best, I didn't say how that made me furious beyond measure.
Anne Enright
I don’t think the world should assume that we are all natural mothers. And it does. I don’t think it’s such a big thing anymore, but the idea that you sacrifice everything for your children—it’s a load of rubbish. It leads to very destructive living and thinking, and it has a much worse effect on children than if you go out and live your own life. You’re meant to adore your children at all times, and you’re not meant to have a bad thought about them. That’s facism, you know, and it’s elevating the child at the expense of the mother. It’s like your life is not valid except in fulfilling this child’s needs. What about all your needs, your desires, your wants, your problems? They’re going to come out anyway, so it’s better they’re acknowledged straight off. Having said that, I really do believe that children have to be protected. They have to be loved. Somewhere between the two, I think, something needs to be sorted out. The relationship between parent and child is so difficult and so complex. There’s every emotion there. We mostly only acknowledge the good ones. If we were allowed to talk about the other ones, maybe it would alleviate them in some way
Marina Carr
If you do it in the bookies, it's a bet. . . . If you pay some 23-year-old in an Armani suit two hundred grand to go to the window for you, it's a derivative.
Paul Murray
Yet, Malice never was his Aim;He lash'd the Vice but spar'd the Name. No individual could resent,Where thousands equally were meant. His Satry points at no Defect, But what all Mortals may correct...Verses on the death of Dr Swift
Jonathan Swift
I replied that England (the dear place of my nativity) was computed to produce three times the quantity of food, more than its inhabitants are able to consume, ... But, in order to feed the luxury and intemperance of the males, and the vanity of the females, we sent away the greatest part of our necessary things to other countries, from whence in return we brought the materials of diseases, folly, and vice, to spend among ourselves. Hence it follows of necessity that vast numbers of our people are compelled to seek their livelihood by begging, robbing, stealing, cheating, pimping, forswearing, flattering, suborning, forging, gaming, lying, fawning, hectoring, voting, scribbling, freethinking,
Jonathan Swift
But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
Jonathan Swift
When the world has once begun to use us ill, it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore.
Jonathan Swift
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
Jonathan Swift
I read somewhere once that getting lost is the best way to find yourself.
Joanne Clancy
What was it about my obsession with romance that always made me feel embarrassed? Like it was a silly, girlish thing to obsess about. In reality, it was what we all wanted, right?
L.H. Cosway
Will you promise to keep this to yourself, to not tell anyone of what we are?” By his words you’d think he was giving me a choice. Like I could say,no deal, honey bunch, I’m off to shout your secret from the rooftops, and he’d be like, oh no please don’t do that. Inreality, he’d have to kill me.
L.H. Cosway
and I wanted this girl who was like no girl I had ever known, wanted her not in spite of her moods and her secret bruises and her sad attempts at artifice but because of them, because of them all.
Tana French
For I did not want him to see, or to question me, for here contains already secrets, and my secrets are my fortune and my sanity.
Sebastian Barry
All families have their secrets, most people would never know them, but they know there are spaces, gaps where the answers should be, where someone should have sat, where someone used to be. A name that is never uttered, or uttered just once and never again. We all have our secrets.
Cecelia Ahern
[E]verywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.
Emma Donoghue