Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 35

If we could only live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives' spits.
James Joyce
It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wife iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.
Trish Deseine
Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.
Colum McCann
I'd rather eat nothing than eat a carrot.
Marian Keyes
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
James Joyce
After a full belly all is poetry.
Frank McCourt
Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well.
James Joyce
The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.
George Bernard Shaw
He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
Jonathan Swift
I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.
Oscar Wilde
Holly clambered after him, struggling up the human-size steps. "Wait! Just wait," she called, overtaking Artemis and looking him in the eye from one step up. "I know you, Artemis. You like to play your genius card close to your chest until the big reveal. And that's worked out for us so far. But this time you need to let me in. I can help. So, tell me the truth, do you have a plan?"Artemis met his friend's gaze and lied to her face. "No," he said. "No plan.
Eoin Colfer
I need some space.""Because of my past?""No, because of mine. When I'm around you I feel like I'm falling. I need to stop before I smash into the ground.""Are you always so honest?""No. Mostly I'm a liar like you.
Anna McPartlin
Truth is the lie you once told returning to haunt you
Dermot Healy
That, as my cousin Nord would say, is where my improvised lie falls apart.
Eoin Colfer
People don't want the truth,' he says, waving a hand at the streets around us. 'They want better-quality lies. High definition lies on fifty-inch screens.
Paul Murray
I believe his lies, so he believes mine.' She turns and looks at me straight on. 'That's how it goes at the end of love.
Paul Murray
Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.
Jonathan Swift
The truth is the most desirable woman in the world and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her. We betray her routinely, spending hours and days stupor-deep in lies, and then turn back to her holding out the lover's ultimate Möbius strip: But I only did it because I love you so much.
Tana French
It meant nothing. Some people are like that: everything comes out like a lie. Not that they're brilliant liars, just that they're useless at telling the truth. You get left with no way to tell what's the real fake and what's the fake one.
Tana French
And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.
James Joyce
The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves.
Derek Landy
It was an earthquake, tearing at the sons of America, trying to swallow them up. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful sons, that women had reared, had kissed and screamed at, and that fathers had stared intently in their cots, to see themselves in the wondrous mirrors of their babies.
Sebastian Barry
The AI told her not long ago that her "Why?" period might have been the shortest on record - because Mum and Dad answered every "Why?" in detail AND made sure she understood, so she wouldn't ask that particular "Why?" again. After a month "Why?" wasn't fun anymore, and she went on to other things.
Anne McCaffrey
All parents set out with expectations, hopes and dreams for their child. When a child is diagnosed with a health problem, these aspirations are altered. While one parent is hoping to see their child graduate from university, another is praying that they can live pain free
Sharon Dempsey
The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
Oscar Wilde
Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible.......Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the usual general practitioner's light-hearted way, without previous highly skilled examination of the state of the patient's blood, is just as likely to be a simple manslaughter as a cure or preventive. But vaccination is nothing short of attempted murder. A skilled bacteriologist would just as soon think of cutting his child's arm and rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound, as vaccinating it in the same.
George Bernard Shaw
When I came to again—parched, pain rampaging through my intestines—I was in my bed. The little bedside lamp illuminated two anxious faces, my sister’s and Mrs. P.’s (the latter looking a shade guilty, I noted, no doubt realizing that it was effectively through her negligence that I had been forced to poison myself) [. . .] “I think he has eaten many kidney beans.” Mrs. P. shuddered. “Many kidney beans not cooked.” “Beans!” I cried again deliriously. “Oh for heaven’s sake,” Bel said. “Charles, listen carefully, did you soak the beans before you cooked them?” “Of course I didn’t soak them,” I said. “What are you talking about?
Paul Murray
I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.
Oscar Wilde
Ignorance, as they say, is usually fatal, but sometimes it can be bliss.
Eoin Colfer
HE who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.
George Berkeley
Put a thief among honest men and they will eventually relieve him of his watch.
Flann O'Brien
-Nobody can force you to smile, she says. -What? I ask. But I know she's not even talking to me, only to herself, as if she's the last person left in the room. -They can make you show your teeth, but what good is that? Nobody can make you smile against your will.
Hugo Hamilton
Imagine if we had no secrets, no respite from the truth. What if everything was laid bare the moment we introduced ourselves?
Catherine Doyle
People don't like it when you say real things.
Sara Baume
She'd tried her hand at most things, but drew the line at honesty.
Roddy Doyle
The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.
Oscar Wilde
Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.
George Bernard Shaw
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
James Joyce
You can't be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you're beautiful people will be looking at you.
Niall Williams
Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the mountains. Near are lakes. Round their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. Aroma rises, a strong hair growth of resin. It burns, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the bronze flight of eagles. Under it lies the womancity, nude, white, still, cool, in luxury. A fountain murmurs among damask roses. Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet wine grapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely murmuring.
James Joyce
And, in the darkness, David closed his eyes as all that was lost was found again.
John Connolly
I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.
W.B. Yeats
I want to burn the world because Alan is gone," he said. "I want to destroy everything I see. But you mean something to me. I will not destroy the world, because it has you in it.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Also, vampires don't eat food. You never get to eat chocolate again. Ever. I'd rather die.
Sarah Rees Brennan
I saw the patterns of history and thought that a human might be eighty per cent chemicals, eighteen per cent his past, and two per cent feeling, creatures of habit. Which makes psychiatrists really pharmacists who have to listen longer.
Gerard Donovan
Maybe I’m a human, but I’m a me-and-Ma as well.
Emma Donoghue
Souls and memories can do strange things during trance.
Bram Stoker
Oft in the stilly night,Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,Fond memory brings the lightOf other days around me; The smiles, the tears, Of boyhood years,The words of love then spoken; The eyes that shown Now dimmed and gone,The cheerful hearts now broken.(from When the Splendor Falls by Laurie McBain)
Thomas Moore
...and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to mind with ambiguous alterations--sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Let me advise you, my dear young friend-- nay, let me warn you with all seriousness, that should you leave these rooms you will not by any chance go to sleep in any other part of the castle. It is old, and has many memories, and there are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely.
Bram Stoker
You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.
John Banville
Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.
Samuel Beckett
Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.
Oscar Wilde
Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian...I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does. I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.
Oscar Wilde
Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.
Oscar Wilde
Do we fulfill our obligations by being practical all the time?
James Plunkett
I know the difference between right and wrong. I understand the rules. But today I feel that the rules have been blurred, because today they were literally on my front doorstep.
Cecelia Ahern
You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person!
Oscar Wilde
An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. They who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill.
Edmund Burke
Certainly nothing is unnatural that is not physically impossible.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan