Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 33

Stories come alive in the telling. (…)They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read.
John Connolly
She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends - books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smokey London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one another...
Diane Duane
Making a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as she can make it feel.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
When did it start? Easy. Where it always does, at the beginnin.
Mia Gallagher
These were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside.
John Connolly
The stories in books hate the stories contained in newspapers.
John Connolly
There's my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don't say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.
Samuel Beckett
Everyone's got a different story.
Emma Donoghue
Maybe instead of strings it's stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that's why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people's we know, until you've got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter, or even a whole word....
Paul Murray
You will go on and meet someone else and I'll just be a chapter in your tale, but for me, you were, you are and you always will be, the whole story.
Marian Keyes
Stories come alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth. Or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.
John Connolly
She could go on asking herself why roses had thorns or she could be thankful that thorns had roses.
Ella Griffin
I don't have your way with words "Sin said. "So I'm just going to go with a quick response. Ha
Sarah Rees Brennan
I can smite you " Nick grumbled. "Anytime I like.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is asacrament that should be taken kneeling.
Oscar Wilde
I-" said Nick, his voice halting. "I don't mind it as much when - when people touch me. Some people."Mae looked down, and Nick, who looked more relaxed when he'd been stabbed, slowly lifted his hand from his chest and laid it on the tumbled sheets between them, fingers half-curled into his palm. He was still regarding the ceiling with a fixed glare."Because you trust them not to hurt you?" Mae asked tentatively."No," Nick said, his voice harsh. "Because I'd let them hurt me.
Sarah Rees Brennan
why can't we love the right people? what is so wrong with us that we rush into situations to which we are manifestly unsuited, which will hurt us and others? why are we given emotions which we cannot control and which move in exact contradiction to what we really want? we are walking conflicts, internal battles on legs.
Marian Keyes
‎"Sarge, mr. Nurd here is threatening to turn me to jelly.""really?" said Sarge. "what flavor?
John Connolly
Leave him alone!" Debbie shouted."Shut up, please, or I'll kill you," Mr Tiny replied.
Darren Shan
If invisible people eat invisible food does invisible wind blow invisible trees?
Cecelia Ahern
If we were truly created by God, then why do we still occasionally bite the insides of our own mouths?
Dara Ó Briain
We all get lost once in a while, sometimes by choice, sometimes due to forces beyond our control. When we learn what it is our soul needs to learn, the path presents itself. Sometimes we see the way out but wander further and deeper despite ourselves; the fear, the anger or the sadness preventing us returning. Sometimes we prefer to be lost and wandering, sometimes it's easier. Sometimes we find our own way out. But regardless, always, we are found.
Cecelia Ahern
You're dressed for dancing," she said in her throaty stage voice. "Being undressed for dancing occured to me, but I didn't think Merris would like it.
Sarah Rees Brennan
loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.
Oscar Wilde
—Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.
James Joyce
I discovered that everything you do is in response to a request or a suggestion made to you by some other party either inside you or outside. Some of these suggestions are good and praiseworthy and some of them are undoubtedly delightful. But the majority of them are definitely bad and are pretty considerable sins as sins go.
Flann O'Brien
Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. The verses passed from his lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken brutal words rushed forth from his brain to force a passage. His blood was in revolt. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering into the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound. He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast. He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin. He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration. He stretched out his arms in the street to hold fast the frail swooning form that eluded him and incited him: and the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips. It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal.
James Joyce
the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.
Oscar Wilde
You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.
Oscar Wilde
Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.
Oscar Wilde
Most of the bad situations I've encountered began with the best of intentions.
John Connolly
Because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good.
Oscar Wilde
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
Oscar Wilde
They may talk of a comet, or a burning mountain, or some such bagatelle; but to me a modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation.
Oliver Goldsmith
You are perfectly right in making some slight alteration. Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
Oscar Wilde
She roared with laughter. Passersby gave her strange looks, but she didn’t care. If she’d been able to stretch her vision to see beyond the trees he disappeared behind, she would have stopped laughing. She would have seen the couple who’d been in the dark street near the restaurant the previous night, again breaking into laughter when he felt it was safe to abandon the Wally persona. Everywhere she saw that one man, she didn’t see the woman behind him, with him, beside him, urging him on, supporting him. If she had, she might have wondered then who the display was really for.
Cecelia Ahern
The closest I’d ever got to seeing a naked woman before was black and white cleavage, and then Rosie tossed her clothes in a corner just like they were getting in the way and spun around in the dim light of Number 16, palms up, luminous, laughing, almost close enough to touch. The thought still knocks the wind out of me. I was too young even to know what I wanted to do about her, I just knew nothing in the World, not the Mona Lisa walking through the Grand Canyon with the Holy Grail in one hand and a winning lotto ticket in the other, was ever going to be that beautiful.
Tana French
HIGGINS [sitting down beside her] Rubbish! you shall marry an ambassador. You shall marry the Governor-General of India or the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, or somebody who wants a deputy-queen. I'm not going to have my masterpiece thrown away on Freddy.LIZA. You think I like you to say that. But I haven't forgot what you said a minute ago; and I won't be coaxed round as if I was a baby or a puppy. If I can't have kindness, I'll have independence.HIGGINS. Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.LIZA [rising determinedly] I'll let you see whether I'm dependent on you. If you can preach, I can teach. I'll go and be a teacher.HIGGINS. What'll you teach, in heaven's name?LIZA. What you taught me. I'll teach phonetics.HIGGINS. Ha! Ha! Ha!
George Bernard Shaw
And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and wilful as a bird's heart?
James Joyce
Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.
James Joyce
Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life.
Oscar Wilde
I suppose it is that sickness and weakness are selfish things and turn our inner eyes and sympathy on ourselves, whilst health and strength give love rein, and in thought and feeling he can wander where he wills.
Bram Stoker
One knows so well the popular idea of health: the English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the unbeatable.
Oscar Wilde
The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers; but a moment's reflection will shew that this utilitarian application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the shedding of blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a mangy sheep or an ox with the rinderpest: it calls down divine wrath instead of appeasing it. In doing it we offer God as a sacrifice the gratification of our own revenge and the protection of our own lives without cost to ourselves; and cost to ourselves is the essence of sacrifice and expiation.
George Bernard Shaw
They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man's goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage.
Jonathan Swift
You are unjust to women in England. And till you count what is a a shame in a woman to be an infamy in a man, you will always be unjust, and Right, that pillar of fire, and Wrong, that pillar of cloud, will be made dim to your eyes, or be not seen at all, or if seen, not regarded.
Oscar Wilde
Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else. That's what life is after all.
James Joyce
Law and justice are not the same.
John Connolly
To him [Faraday], as to all true philosophers, the main value of a fact was its position and suggestiveness in the general sequence of scientific truth.
John Tyndall
Science knows it doesn't know everything; otherwise, it'd stop. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.
Dara Ó Briain
One day when I was praying, it suddenly occurred to me thatI was talking to myself.
Peter O'Toole
At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.
George Bernard Shaw
—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?—I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?
James Joyce
The trick was not to stifle the emotions, but to control them. Love, anger, grief – all were weapons in their way, but they needed to be kept in check.
John Connolly
You forget what it was like. You'd swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst. How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.
Tana French
Gloria screamed, but nothing came out. She could feel the scream in her throat, but it was clinging there, too scared to climb out of her mouth.Raymond might have screamed, too--he wasn't sure. His face was an exploding red ball--that was what it felt like. His heart was in the middle of his head. He couldn't see a thing.
Roddy Doyle
One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.
Oscar Wilde
Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.
Iris Murdoch
I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.
Oscar Wilde
It is something like the way dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper root for its causes than we have knowledge of.
Bram Stoker