Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 27

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.
Samuel Beckett
Despair is the central part of the psychopathology. For the handmaiden of gossip is treachery:
Alexander Cockburn
And maybe, although it was a thing you could hardly bear to think about, like death or your last judgment, maybe he would be the last one ever and he would walk away now and it would only be a question of waiting for it all to end and hoping for better things in the next world. But that was silly, it was never too late.
Brian Moore
Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,My heart is as some famine-murdered land Whence all good things have perished utterly, And well I know my soul in Hell must lieIf this night before God's throne should stand.
Oscar Wilde
What was the power that induced strong soldiers to put off their jackets and shirts, and present their hands to be tied up, and tortured for hours, it might be, under the scourge, with an air of ready volition? The moral coercion of despair; the result of an unconscious calculation of chances that satisfies them that it is ultimately better to do all that, bad as it is, than try the alternative. These unconscious calculations are going on every day with each of us, and the results embody themselves in our lives; and no one knows that there has been a process and a balance struck, and that what they see, and very likely blame, is by the fiat of an invisible but quite irresistible power.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.
Adrian McKinty
A demon obsessed with being human is a demon no longer
John Connolly
Humans, after all, weren’t actively hostile toward most of the species we’d made extinct over the millennia of our ascendance; they simply weren’t part of our design. The same could turn out to be true of superintelligent machines, which would stand in a similar kind of relationship to us as we ourselves did to the animals we bred for food, or the ones who fared little better for all that they had no direct dealings with us at all.
Mark O'Connell
Slow animals always become prey in the end.
John Connolly
Ugh!' snarled the Wolf, as he limped through the brushwood with his tail between his legs, 'this is perfectly monstrous weather. Why doesn't the Government look to it?
Oscar Wilde
Every dog must have his day.
Jonathan Swift
The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older.
George Bernard Shaw
The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain.
Adrian McKinty
No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression.
James Connolly
In a struggle against a revolutionary idea it is only possible to use ideological elements which are a thousand times more radical, or adopt principles which represent a total reaction against them.
Francis Stuart Campbell
One did not love revolution. One embraced it with horror for the sake of the deliverance to follow.
Gabrielle Warnock
But we had ceased to hate. Belsen had some way cured us of all hate, at least all hate of any human creature. We had learned what evil there is in the world or beyond the world, what happens to a man or a group of men-call them a nation if you will- when they have given themselves over to the powers of evil, when they have denied the Christ.
Robert Collis
Peace is the opposite of dreaming. It’s built slowly and surely through brutal compromises and tiny victories that you don’t even see. It’s a messy business, bringing peace into the world.
Bono
The only ironic thing about that song is that it's called 'Ironic' and it is written by a woman who doesn't know what irony is. That's quite ironic when you think about it. (on Alanis Morissette's 'Ironic')
Ed Byrne
JACKYou're quite perfect, Miss Fairfax.GWENDOLENOh! I hope I am not that. It would leave no room for developments, and I intend to develop in many directions.
Oscar Wilde
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.
Bram Stoker
It is very wrong to kill any one[.]""Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!
Oscar Wilde
If it is true that we cannot possess knowledge of what is good in any absolute sense, it is equally true that we have an ethical duty to decide between what is better and what is worse.
Richard Kearney
I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important
Iris Murdoch
Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.
Oscar Wilde
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?
George Bernard Shaw
In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
Oscar Wilde
And the Crooked Man heard her dreams, because that was where he wandered. His place was the land of the imagination, the world where stories began. The stories were always looking for a way to be told, to be brought to life through books and reading. That was how they crossed over from their world into ours. But with them came the Crooked Man, prowling between his world and ours, looking for stories of his own to create, hunting for children who dreamed bad dreams, who were jealous and angry and proud. And he made kings and queens of them, cursing them with a kind of power, even if the real power lay always in his hands. And in return they betrayed the objects of their jealousy to him, and he took them into his lair deep beneath the castle...
John Connolly
Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.
Oscar Wilde
The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
George Bernard Shaw
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
George Bernard Shaw
The essence of modern capitalism is not slavery of the antique pattern but the possession of the expensive tools of production by a small plutocratic group which controls frequently the tools of persuasion.
Francis Stuart Campbell
She was willing a little bit of sweated labour, incapable of betraying the slogan of her slavers, that since the customer or sucker was paying for his gutrot ten times what it cost to produce and five times what it cost to fling in his face, it was only reasonable to defer to his complaints up to but not exceeding fifty per cent of his exploitation.
Samuel Beckett
You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you.
Oscar Wilde
The question will arise and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine: Which shall rule — wealth or man? Which shall lead — money or intellect? Who shall fill public stations — educated and patriotic freemen or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?
Edward G. Ryan
I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.
Oscar Wilde
Capitalism needs war.
Paul Murray
A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent
Oscar Wilde
To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand—that is art.
James Joyce
Vermeer's skill was in combining few colors, mixing little and using layers of lakes and varnishes to build up the illusion of life
Frank Wynne
An artist must paint not simply surface light but what is inside, what he sees within his subject
Frank Wynne
An artist must paint not simply surface light, but what is inside, what he sees within his subject
Frank Wynne
But nowadays I feel guilty that I am granted the immunity of the artistically gifted, having never actually achieved anything to prove myself worthy.
Sara Baume
The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the god of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
James Joyce
They're only trees. Only trees. Whose afraid of lonely trees?
Ruth Frances Long
poetry is not—except in a very limited sense—a form of self-expression. Who on earth supposes that the pearl expresses the oyster?
Cecil Day-Lewis
All the drawing lacksis the final touch: To addeyes to the dragon
Diane Duane
You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it. If you won the Irish Sweepstakes and bought a house that needed furniture would you fill it with bits and pieces of rubbish? Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish from the cinemas, it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.
Frank McCourt
I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin
Frank McCourt
This book tells my story. I’m writing it in Ireland, in a house on a hillside. The house sits low in the landscape between a holy well and the site of an Iron Age dwelling. It was built of stones ploughed out of the fields by men who knew how to raise them with their hands and to lock one stone to the next so each was firm. It’s a lone house on the foothills of the last mountain on the Dingle peninsula, the westernmost point in mainland Europe. At night the sky curves above it like a dark bowl, studded with stars.…From the moment I crossed the mountain, I fell in love with the place, which was more beautiful than any I’d ever seen. And with a way of looking at life that was deeper, richer, and wiser than any I’d known before.
Felicity Hayes-McCoy
You are the greatest achievement of your own life.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Girlfriends aren’t allowed to care if you have Stilton socks. Friends are.” All the same, she gave her hands a quick, professional shake and took hold of my foot. “Plus, you might be less of a pain in the arse if you got more action.
Tana French
Women are attracted to bad boys not because they want to fall in love… we just want to ride on the backs of their motor bikes.
Dermot Davis
I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds?
Tana French
I could tell from Anna's face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. She had told a secret and now had the sadness of wondering how much deeper she might dig in order to keep the first secret fed.
Colum McCann
It is time to end a story that began in sorrow and ordeal and has ended in a deep and lasting happiness. May it be so for others.
Anne McCaffrey
Keep your heart infinitesimally small and sorrow will never spy it, never plunge, never flap away with your heart in her claws.
Emma Donoghue
Many a month of gloomy unconsciousness rolled over me, without date or notice. One thousand waves may welter over a sunk wreck, and be felt as one.
Charles Robert Maturin
Most people think it's normal to have a nameless sorrow at the bottom of your soul.
Diane Duane
Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things
Oscar Wilde