Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 29

To enter a room is to move from one environment to another and that, for the teenager, can be traumatic. There be dragons, daily horrors from acne to zit.
Frank McCourt
I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching.
Frank McCourt
You can't teach in a vacuum. A good teacher relates the material to real life. You understand that, don't you?
Frank McCourt
Teaching is bringing the news.
Frank McCourt
Nobody ever told them they had a right to an opinion.
Frank McCourt
Everything in my head was secondhand, too: Catholicism; Ireland's sad history, a litany of suffering and martyrdom drummed into me by priests, schoolmasters and parents who knew no better.
Frank McCourt
There's something hostile about the way they enter and leave the room that tells you what they think of you. It could be your imagination and you try to figure out what will bring them over to your side. You try lessons that worked with other classes but even that doesn't help and it's because of that chemistry. They know when they have you on the run. They have instincts that detect your frustrations.
Frank McCourt
I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.
George Bernard Shaw
mostly we've had to found ways to amuse ourselves.""Really?" Valkyrie asked. "Like what?"Plight's smile faded. "Like human sacrifice."He grabbed one arm and Lenka grabbed the other and Valkyrie cried out.Then they both let go. laughing."Naw," Plight said, we just play board games."..."she fell for it!" gasped Lenka. "She fell for the human sacrifice bit!
Derek Landy
Don't hate me forever, Arty," whispered Holly. "I couldn't bear that.
Eoin Colfer
Artemis looked at Holly and felt a tremendous affection for her... he could properly appreciate how fierce and beautiful his best friend was...She is truly magical, thought Artemis. Perhaps her qualities are more obvious to me now that I have decided to sacrifice myself.
Eoin Colfer
How could you...? How?""Logically you have no right to be angry. I simply followed your l
Eoin Colfer
It’s one thing to go into a fight knowing you’ll probably lose. Quite another to be told that to win, you must offer up your throat to be slit.
Darren Shan
Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
George Bernard Shaw
Regardless of the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can't have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it's a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that's worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.
Tana French
The day we stop learning is the day we die.
Michael Scott
Who do you think's after you, Shane, my lad? Or is it just the dark you're afeared of?
Adrian McKinty
What's a Dullahan?''He's a headless horseman, in the service of the banshee.''Headless?''Yes.''Seriously?''Yes.''So he has no head?''That's usually what headless means.''No head at all?''You're really getting hung up on this headless thing, aren't you?''It's just kind of silly, even for us.''Yet you spend your days with a living skeleton.''But at least he has a head.''True.''He even has a spare.
Derek Landy
Skul-man!' he exclaimed as he rushed forward to shake his hand. 'Last I heard you were trapped on a dead world overrun by evil trans-dimensional superfiends!' Skulduggery nodded. 'Just got back.
Derek Landy
After all, in this world of humans, he was little better than a monster, and what did a monster have to be afraid of in the dark?
Darren Shan
Taking him for all and all, I think it will be conceded that Michael Faraday was the greatest experimental philosopher the world has ever seen.
John Tyndall
I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.
Oscar Wilde
Giving evidence against one's employers was the first step to unemployment.
Eoin Colfer
You pay by the hour, even if the job only takes five minutes. I don’t do fractions.
John Connolly
He was comparing you to the butterflies that you both adore and cherish, and he said you were special for the same reasons: you were rare, exotic and entirely you. He said you're beautiful exactly the way are now.
Cecelia Ahern
You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.
Oscar Wilde
Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn't tell you. But is it true love, in the rectum? That's what bothers me sometimes. Have I never known true love, after all?
Samuel Beckett
Do you believe in destiny? That even the powers of time can be altered for a single purpose? That the luckiest man who walks on this earth is the one who finds… true love?
Bram Stoker
Now, I can understand why the appearance of a man struggling violently, as it would seem, with an airy nothing, and calling for assistance against a vision, should have appeared ludicrous. Then, so great was my rage against the mocking crowd that had I the power I would have stricken them dead where they stood.
Fitz-James O'Brien
One might trouble one's dainty snout with a whiff of the taleggio displayed in an artisanal cheese shop, or take a saucer of jasmine tea and a knuckle of fennel-scented snuff at a counter of buffed Big Nothing granite. But there was a want in these ladies yet, and it was for the rude life of youth.
Kevin Barry
But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.
Sara Baume
There's a clock on the wall. Press your hand against the face and turn it very slightly to the. Left. There'll be a click to tell you it's done.""Sounds easy enough.""Yes it does," said Sanguine. "Kiss for good luck?""Maybe later," said Gracious."How about a handshake?" Asked Donegan.
Derek Landy
Of course I saved you," she said. "I couldn't do without you." And because she was happy and flushed with magic, Holly leaned down and kissed Artemis, magic sparking around the contact like tiny fireworks.
Eoin Colfer
You convinced me that you're a good kisser, that doesn't mean you like me." "I'm here pretending to be your boyfriend with the possibility of getting zero benefits from you. Trust me kitten, I like you. I like you a whole lottle, remember?
L.A. Casey
Technologies of the soul tend to be simple, bodily, slow and related to the heart as much as the mind. Everything around us tells us we should be mechanically sophisticated, electronic, quick, and informational in our expressiveness - an exact antipode to the virtues of the soul. It is no wonder, then, that in an age of telecommunications - which, by the way, literally means "distant connections" - we suffer symptoms of the loss of soul. We are being urged from every side to become efficient rather than intimate.
Thomas Moore
It seemed to me that transhumanism was an expression of the profound human longing to transcend the confusion and desire and impotence and sickness of the body, cowering in the darkening shadow of its own decay. This longing had historically been the domain of religion, and was now the increasingly fertile terrain of technology.
Mark O'Connell
We're at a crucial point in history. We cannot have fast cars, computers the size of credit cards, and modern conveniences, whilst simultaneously having clean air, abundant rainforests, fresh drinking water and a stable climate. This generation can have one or the other but not both. Humanity must make a choice. Both have an opportunity cost. Gadgetry or nature? Pick the wrong one and the next generations may have neither.
Mark Boyle
The nice thing about twitter is the architecture of visibility. Email is invisible unless you reach out to someone directly. With Twitter, anyone can follow you and this is one of the big changes that was really introduced by Flickr, was this wonderful idea that you can follow somebody without their permission. Recognizing that relationships are asymmetrical, unlike facebook where we have to acknowledge each other otherwise we can’t see each other.
Tim O'Reilly
A CD. How quaint. We have these in museums.
Eoin Colfer
Belief and confusion are not mutually exclusive; I believe that belief gives you the direction in the confusion. But you don't see the full picture. That's the point. That's what faith is. You can't see it. It comes back to instinct. Faith is just up the street. Faith and instinct, you can't just rely on them. You have to beat them up. You have to pummel them to make sure they can withstand it, to make sure they can be trusted.
Bono
When I penetrate into that house, if I ever do, it will be to go on turning, faster and faster, more and more convulsive, like a constipated dog, or one suffering from worms, overturning furniture, in the midst of my family all trying to embrace me at once, until by virtue of a supreme spasm I am catapulted in the opposite direction and gradually leave backwards, without having said good evening.
Samuel Beckett
You always were such a worrier. It was as if you thought your worrying was all that held the world together, and if you stopped for a split second the whole thing would just fly apart.
Paul Murray
That's another sort of being haunted: starting something and never finishing it.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
The old summer's-end melancholy nips at my heels. There's no school to go back to; no detail of my life will change come the onset of September; yet still, I feel the old trepidation.
Sara Baume
Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.
Tana French
The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.
Oscar Wilde
Survival was an unpleasent thing to witness.
Marian Keyes
Some part of me believed, unassailably, and wordlessly and perhaps with a flick of justice, that they had sent me away because they were afraid of me. Like some monstrously deformed child who should never have lived beyond infancy, or a conjoined twin whose other half died under the knife, I had- simply by surviving-become a freak of nature.
Tana French
If you're getting chased by a lion, you don't need to run faster than the lion, just the people running with you. - Tim Ferris
David Nihill
The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
The strong survive, but the courageous triumph.
Michael Scott
The master says it’s a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it’s a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there’s anyone in the world who would like us to live.
Frank McCourt
Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his /pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs/, --- and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own.But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure, --- no, nor from the law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinions.
Edmund Burke
Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
Oscar Wilde
I pray to God to give me perseverance and to deign that I be a faithful witness to Him to the end of my life for my God.
St. Patrick
Suppose your whole world seems to rock on its foundations. Hold on steadily, let it rock, and when the rocking is over, the picture will have reassembled itself into something much nearer to your heart's desire
Emmet Fox
Start with the difficult and when it gets easy, everything else is easier.
Frank Delaney
It's quite widespread in rock culture, that mythology of the shooting star.I'd rather be the North star. As bob (Dylan) says, you can navigate by it.
Bono
You hand fits in mine like its made to be but bear this in mind it was meant to be and im joining up the dots with the freckles on you cheeks and it all makes sense to me. I know you've never loved the crinkles by your eyes when you smile you've never loved your stomach or your thighs and the dimples in your back at the bottom of your spine but I love them endlessly.I won't let these little things slip out of my mouth but if i do its you oh its you they add up to and Im in love with you and all your little thing. You can't go to bed without a cup of tea and maybe thats the reason that you talk in you sleep and all those conversations are the secrets that I keep though it makes no sense to me. I know you've never loved the sound of your voice on tape you never want to know how much you weigh you still have to squeeze into to your jeans but you're perfect to me. I won't let these little things slip out of my mouth but if its true its you its these they add up to and Im in love with you and all you little things. You'll never love yourself half as much as I love you and you'll never treat yourself right darlin' but I want you to if I let you know I'm here for you then maybe you'll love yourself like I love you ohhhhh. And I've just let these little things slip out of my mouth cause its you oh its you its you they add up to and Im in love with you and all your little things I wont let these little things slip out of my mouth but if its true its you its you they add up to and im in love with you and all your little things. <3
One Direction
Valkyrie Cain got out of the passenger side. She zipped upher black jacket against the cold, and joined Skulduggery as hewalked up to the front door. She glanced at him, and saw that he was smiling."Stop doing that,” she sighed.“Stop doing what?” Skulduggery responded in that gloriously velvet voice of his.“Stop smiling. The person we want to talk to lives in the only dark house on a bright street. That’s not a good sign.”“I didn’t realise I was smiling,” he said. They stopped at the door, and Skulduggery made a concerted effort to shift his features. His mouth twitcheddownwards. “Am I smiling now?”“No.”“Excellent,” he said, and the smile immediately sprang back up.
Derek Landy