Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 32

Well, young man, have you found anyone worthy of your respect?"Artemis smiled back. "Yes," he said. "I believe I have.
Eoin Colfer
If you take goodwill for granted and get sloppy, you might get away with it once or twice, but you won't get away with it for ever. You should always treat the things that treat you good with respect, because otherwise you will suffer for it. More important than that is the fact that it's just the right thing to do.
Kate Kerrigan
Fight only in direst needNot for lust or petty greedHonor those that do give birthRespect them well for their full worth
Anne McCaffrey
I have found that there are two ways of dealing with men. Either you treat them with respect, or you kill them. Anything in between merely breeds resentment and the desire for revenge.
Paul Kearney
The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.
Edmund Burke
You could have kept on driving and never looked back. No one's ever had to stop for me. Or even hear me. Anyway, you did, and now I'm afraid the time for choice is behind us both.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
What the proponents of prostitution conveniently ignore is that lack of opportunity is lack of choice.
Rachel Moran
The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the world, and so we must live within it, with whatever compromises that might entail.
Paul Murray
What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts.
Oscar Wilde
The Coming of Wisdom with TimeThough leaves are many, the root is one;Through all the lying days of my youthI swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;Now I may wither into the truth.
W.B. Yeats
I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find
W.B. Yeats
The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her latest wonder.
Oscar Wilde
I never saw "being different" in and of itself as the point to "being Goth" -- dressing different from most others, maybe, but the point to me was to get together with people who liked the same music and clothes, or at least very similar music and clothes, and go to clubs, go to movies, go to coffee-houses and hold poetry readings and, in general, just have some good harmless fun. Did I look like a dork? Sure, but so did everybody else in the club. We weren't "being different", at least not all of us, we just were different and the point was to stop bitching about being different and just have fun.
Ruadhán J. McElroy
See all the women seated, youth in their face lifts, old age in their hands.
J.P. Donleavy
Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.
Oscar Wilde
If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.
Oscar Wilde
A living skeleton isn't enough for you, is it? What does it take to impress young people these days?
Derek Landy
But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.
Oscar Wilde
Youth is wasted on the young.
George Bernard Shaw
The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.
Oscar Wilde
Are you an angel or a devil, sir? I need to know. Are you taking me up or down?
Eoin Colfer
I can't stand light. I hate weather. My idea of heaven is moving from one smoke-filled room to another.
Peter O'Toole
And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, 'You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.
Oscar Wilde
Heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation
George Bernard Shaw
Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven.
George Bernard Shaw
Happiness is the anticipation of future happines.
Anna Carey
I love stories with a happy ending,” Inspector Me said.
Derek Landy
When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.
Oscar Wilde
Places are supposed to look smaller when you go back to them, but my road just looked schizoid. A couple of the houses had had nifty little makeovers involving double glazing and amusing faux-antique pastel paint; most of them hadn't. Number 16 looked like it was on its last legs: the roof was in tatters, there was a pile of bricks and a dead wheelbarrow by the front steps, and at some point in the last twenty years someone had set the door on fire. In Number 8, a window on the first floor was lit up, gold and cozy and dangerous as hell.
Tana French
I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century. I rejoice also that there is a chapel of old times. We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may be amongst the common dead. I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young; and my heart, through wearing years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken; the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may.
Bram Stoker
...everyone goes home in the end.
Emma Donoghue
Places ain't home. People is. Bricks and chairs is nothing.
Paul Kearney
Home isn't a place, its a feeling
Cecelia Ahern
If the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they would be mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats.
Robert Lynd
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.
W.B. Yeats
If we possess narrative sympathy - enabling us to see the world from other's point of view - we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love.
Richard Kearney
If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.
Oscar Wilde
Where has Arnold been?’ I said. ‘... the Westwoods get in the papers.’‘Patting the orphans.’‘Getting homes for the homeless.’‘Legs for the legless.’ She was laughing as she said it.‘Blind dogs,’ I said. ‘Dogs for the blind, that is.’‘Patting blind dogs.’ We both laughed and drank. ‘Getting legs for them.’‘Homes for legless, blind orphan dogs.’ Maybe we were both a little drunk, on bourbon or on the past.
James Ferron Anderson
Dear little Swallow,’ said the Prince, ‘you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery.
Oscar Wilde
Outside has everything. Whenever I think of a thing now like skis or fireworks or islands or elevators or yo-yos, I have to remember they're real, they're actually happening in Outside all together. It makes my head tired. And people too, firefighters teachers burglars babies saints soccer players and all sorts, they're all really in Outside. I'm not there, though, me and Ma, we're the only ones not there. Are we still real?
Emma Donoghue
History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.
Edmund Burke
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
Oscar Wilde
Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that one should live. If any love is shown us we should recognize that we are quite unworthy of it. Nobody is worthy to be loved... or if that phrase is a bitter one to bear, let us say that everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling..
Oscar Wilde
The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.
Oscar Wilde
Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque?
Sara Baume
The willingness to reexamine lifelong beliefs because of conflicting data takes enormous courage, and contrasts sharply with recent examples of public discourse in which our political, cultural, and religious leaders have fit data to preconceived theories.
Donal O'Shea
The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.
Oscar Wilde
I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.
Colum McCann
If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.
Oscar Wilde
It's strange but as I grow older, I find myself developing more optimism. I keep inching toward the point where I believe that it's more difficult to have hope than it is to embrace cynicism. In the deep dark end, there's no point unless we have at least a modicum of hope. We trawl our way through the darkness hoping to find a pinpoint of light. But isn't it remarkable that the cynics of this world—the politicians, the corporations, the squinty-eyed critics—seem to think that they have a claim on intelligence? They seem to think that it's cooler, more intellectually engaging, to be miserable, that there's some sort of moral heft in cynicism. But I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who are prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small.
Colum McCann
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: … But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I'm neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.(Act I., lines 132-140)
Oscar Wilde
An optimist is a braver cynic.
Colum McCann
A monkey glances up and sees a banana, and that's as far as he looks. A visionary looks up and sees the moon.
Eoin Colfer
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
Oscar Wilde
This is a bad story.”“Sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”“No, you should,” I say.“But—”“I don’t want there to be bad stories and me not know them.
Emma Donoghue
There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told.
Ciaran Carson
While food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.
Richard Kearney
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.
Niall Williams
If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows.
Niall Williams