Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 30

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment.
Oscar Wilde
To obtain and possess the kingdoms of the world, with their power and glory, by violent injustice is to worship Satan. To obtain and possess the kingdom, the power, and the glory by nonviolent justice is to worship God.
John Dominic Crossan
Don't you ever think,' he asked cautiously, 'that it would be better to be a bully than to be bullied? At least that way no one could ever hurt you.' Katarina turned to him in amazement. 'No,' she said definitively, shaking her head. 'No Pieter, I never think that, not for a moment.
John Boyne
Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
Iris Murdoch
Violence?"Skulduggery said. "Violence is never the answer, until it's the only answer.
Derek Landy
Life is a precious commodity, Charles. It’s time you achieved your full potential and learned the true value of things.” “You’re talking like a Stalinist!” I cried. “People don’t get jobs to achieve things and learn values! They do it because they have to, and then they use whatever’s left over to buy themselves nice things that make them feel less bad about having jobs!
Paul Murray
It used to be the smartest people didn't always want to be the richest people.
Paul Murray
Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.
Oscar Wilde
We only get what we can deal with."The real voyage of discovery consists...in seeing with new eyes
Sinéad Moriarty
It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.
Oscar Wilde
What if the church should be less concerned with creating saints than creating a world where we do not need saints? A world where people like Mother Teresa and MLK would have nothing to do.
Peter Rollins
It is very difficult sometimes to keep awake, especially at church, but there is no difficulty at all about sleeping.
Oscar Wilde
Plantie is a very strong Protestant, that is to say, he's against all churches, especially the Protestant: and he thinks a lot of Buddha, Karma and Confucius. He is also a bit of an anarchist and three or four years ago he took up Einstein and vitamins.
Joyce Cary
Mike wished Mr. Burden had chosen another time to be murdered. He was beginning to see that the hour of dressing for dinner might have been expressly designed for persons who need a quiet spell for the commission of crime.
Eilís Dillon
I have read of a gentleman who owned a so fine house in London, and when he went for months of summer to Switzerland and lock up his house, some burglar came and broke window at back and got in. Then he went and made open the shutters in front and walk out and in through the door, before the very eyes of the police. Then he have an auction in that house, and advertise it, and put up big notice; and when the day come he sell off by a great auctioneer all the goods of that other man who own them. Then he go to a builder, and he sell him that house, making an agreement that he pull it down and take all away within a certain time. And your police and other authority help him all they can. And when that owner come back from his holiday in Switzerland he find only an empty hole where his house had been. This was all done en règle; and in our work we shall be en règle too. We shall not go so early that the policemen who have then little to think of, shall deem it strange; but we shall go after ten o’clock, when there are many about, and such things would be done were we indeed owners of the house.
Bram Stoker
He’d have denied it to his dying breath but Derwent wasn’t as tough as he pretended to be. For the very small number of people he cared about, Derwent would give his all. It made him vulnerable, and every now and then that vulnerability showed.
Jane Casey
Speculation is a dangerous thing without any evidence to back it up.
Jane Casey
I'm not working-class: I come from the criminal classes.
Peter O'Toole
Good. Illegal is always faster.
Eoin Colfer
He means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow.
Bram Stoker
Bread – like real love – took time, cultivation, strong loving hands and patience. It lived, rising and growing to fruition only under the most perfect circumstances.
Melissa Hill
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
Edmund Burke
However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise.
Michael Foley
Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-sniffing loser shunned by society, or a psycho planning to return to college with an automatic weapon and a backpack full of ammo.
Michael Foley
...the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the buildings like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars.
Tana French
Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.
Elizabeth Bowen
I never went downstairs to join my housemates around the television. I cooked dinner later than everyone else and carried the plate up to my bedroom. I knew they must have thought me aloof, or a little bit eccentric, or maybe even unkind, but I didn't care. Once the kitchen door swung shut behind me, I was alone, and so everything was okay.
Sara Baume
I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.
Iris Murdoch
Starting right now, attempt to live as if you have no regrets.
John O'Callaghan
This is the place where death rejoices to help those who live. It's written somewhere in every morgue I've ever been in. Nice way of looking at it, isn't it?
Jane Casey
Thoughts which have no chance of succeeding do not take the trouble to come into your head at all.
Flann O'Brien
Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.
James Joyce
take a strict view of their excrements, and, from the colour, the odour, the taste, the consistence, the crudeness or maturity of digestion, form a judgment of their thoughts and designs; because men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at stool...
Jonathan Swift
We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
Oscar Wilde
In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every financier a dictator, every private employer a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at their mercy, and no public responsibility. And to symbolize this state of things, this defeat of all government, you have set up in New York Harbour a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete this monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of Hell ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
George Bernard Shaw
I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true? That's a fact.
James Joyce
The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see.
Sebastian Barry
Everything bad gets shot at in America, says John Cole, and everything good too.
Sebastian Barry
His people had hogs there till the bottom fell out of hogs. The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see. So it was with the world, restless, kind of brutal. Always going on. Not waiting for no man.
Sebastian Barry
I love America and I hate it. I'm torn between the two. I have two conflicting visions of America. One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy.
Bono
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
Oscar Wilde
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
Oscar Wilde
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
George Bernard Shaw
America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself.
Oscar Wilde
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Oscar Wilde
Whatever you can do or think you can begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Goethe.
Nesta Tuomey
Albeit nurtured in democracy, And liking best that state republican Where every man is Kinglike and no manIs crowned above his fellows, yet I see,Spite of this modern fret for Liberty, Better the rule of One, whom all obey, Than to let clamorous demagogues betrayOur freedom with the kiss of anarchy.Wherefore I love them not whose hands profane Plant the red flag upon the piled-up street For no right cause, beneath whose ignorant reignArts, Culture, Reverence, Honor, all things fade, Save Treason and the dagger of her trade, Or Murder with his silent bloody fee.
Oscar Wilde
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw
Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made sense forever…
Roddy Doyle
Bloom of adulthood. Try a whiff of that. On your back in the dark you remember. Ah you remember. Cloudless May day. She joins you in the little summerhouse. Entirely of logs. Both larch and fir. Six feet across. Eight from floor to vertex. Area twenty-four square feet to the furthest decimal. Two small multicoloured lights vis-a-vis. Small stained diamond panes. Under each a ledge. There on summer Sundays after his midday meal your father loved to retreat with Punch and a cushion. The waist of his trousers unbuttoned he sat on the one ledge and turned the pages. You on the other your feet dangling. When he chuckled you tried to chuckle too. When his chuckle died yours too. That you should try to imitate his chuckle pleased and amused him greatly and sometimes he would chuckle for no other reason than to hear you try to chuckle too. Sometimes you turn your head and look out through a rose-red pane. You press your little nose against the pane and all without is rosy. The years have flown and there at the same place as then you sit in the bloom of adulthood bathed in rainbow light gazing before you. She is late.
Samuel Beckett
There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water--it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.
Colum McCann
If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin
Edna O'Brien
I would have dearly liked to close the French doors between us for a bit of peace, but Mam wouldn't allow it; she said that solitude would give me ideas and the last thing a boy of my age needed was ideas.
John Boyne
That is the problem with being twelve. All the grown-ups think they have a right to know your business.
Paul Kearney
Boys my age with whom, in spite of everything, I was obliged to mix occasionally, mocked me.
Samuel Beckett
Did it do me any good, early in life, to believe so many things which were not true? Or did it damage me? Pouring a foundation of disappointment, of uncertainty.
Sara Baume
We parked our bikes on verges so they could graze.
Roddy Doyle
For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.
John Connolly
I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.
James Joyce
Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.
Flann O'Brien