Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 36

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that.
Oscar Wilde
The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.
George Bernard Shaw
Assassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.
George Bernard Shaw
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Oscar Wilde
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
Oscar Wilde
Remember what I told you. If they hated me, they will hate you.
Sinead O'Connor
All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.
Colum McCann
She merely wiped the floor with paper towels and said nothing, brushing her free hand against my shoulder blade—my shoulder blade!—as she carried the soaked paper to the trash can, never holding me fast, refraining not out of lack of humanity but out of fear of being drawn into a request for further tenderness, a request that could only bring her face-to-face with some central revulsion, a revulsion of her husband or herself or both, a revulsion that had come from nowhere, or from her, or perhaps from something I’d done or failed to do, who knew, she didn’t want to know, it was too great a disappointment, far better to get on with the chores, with the baby, with the work, far better to leave me to my own devices, as they say, to leave me to resign myself to certain motifs, to leave me to disappear guiltily into a hole of my own digging. When the time came to stop her from leaving, I did not know what to think or wish for, her husband who was now an abandoner, a hole-dweller, a leaver who had left her to fend for herself, as she said, who’d failed to provide her with the support and intimacy she needed, she complained, who was lacking some fundamental wherewithal, who no longer wanted her, who beneath his scrupulous marital motions was angry, whose sentiments had decayed into a mere sense of responsibility, a husband who, when she shouted, “I don’t need to be provided for! I’m a lawyer! I make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year! I need to be loved!” had silently picked up the baby and smelled the baby’s sweet hair, and had taken the baby for a crawl in the hotel corridor, and afterward washed the baby’s filthy hands and soft filthy knees, and thought about what his wife had said, and saw the truth in her words and an opening, and decided to make another attempt at kindness, and at nine o’clock, with the baby finally drowsy in his cot, came with a full heart back to his wife to find her asleep, as usual, and beyond waking.In short, I fought off the impulse to tell Rachel to go fuck herself.
Joseph O'Neill
Everyone is capable of hate, of wanting to hurt, even kill another person. But when those hatreds manifest themselves out of the mind and into real life, a line is crossed. The line between human and animal.
Kate Kerrigan
Have you shat, my child, I said gently.
Samuel Beckett
Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbor as himself.
W.B. Yeats
...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether. 
Colum McCann
He pushed his two feet together and shot his right arm in the air before clicking his two heels together and saying in a deep and clear voice as possible the words he said every time he left a soldiers presence. 'Heil Hitler,' he said, which, he presumed, was another way of saying, 'Well, goodbye for now, have a pleasant afternoon'.
John Boyne
It is better to read a little and ponder a lot than to read a lot and ponder a little.
Denis Parsons Burkitt
The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.
William Francis Butler
I’m the least fanciful guy around, but on nights when I wonder whether there was any point to my day, I think about this: the first thing we ever did, when we started turning into humans, was draw a line across the cave door and say: Wild stays out. What I do is what the first men did. They built walls to keep back the sea. They fought the wolves for the hearth fire.
Tana French
There he is then, the unfortunate brute, quite miserable because of me, for whom there is nothing to be done, and he so anxious to help, so used to giving orders and to being obeyed. There he is, ever since I came into the world, possibly at his instigation, I wouldn't put it past him, commanding me to be well, you know, in every way, no complaints at all, with as much success as if he were shouting at a lump of inanimate matter.
Samuel Beckett
He looks like a horse in a man costume!
Dylan Moran
Men always want to be a woman`s first love - women like to be a man`s last romance.
Oscar Wilde
THE DEVIL. As far as I went, yes. But I will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. But when you are as old as I am; when you have a thousand times wearied of heaven, like myself and the Commander, and a thousand times wearied of hell, as you are wearied now, you will no longer imagine that every swing from heaven to hell is an emancipation, every swing from hell to heaven an evolution. Where you now see reform, progress, fulfilment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things, you will see nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion....
George Bernard Shaw
Know a man by his metaphors.
John Connolly
To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.
Oscar Wilde
When you are young, feelings are your truth. Love is how you feel. The years have taught me that love is not an emotion that you feel about someone, but what you do for them.
Kate Kerrigan
Kami," he said, "you're crying." "No, I am not," Kami lied. "I got something in my eye.""You got something in your eye.""Yes. Possibly a speck of dust," Kami said, and broke down. "All right, possibly my feelings.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.
Oscar Wilde
a single generation enamoured of foreign ways is almost enough in history to risk the whole continuity of civilization and learning.
Sister Nivedita
If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.
Edmund Burke
We always find something, eh Didi, to let us think we exist?
Samuel Beckett
Toadstool mandarins are a form of toxic jellyfish whose tentacles are loaded with entheogenic venom. The effects of a mandarin sting are threefold. The first is a sharp stinging sensation; the second a nasty red welt, which may fester if not treated with a salve of toadstool mandarin doodoo. And the third is a bold of self-awareness, thanks to the entheogens in the venom. Having been stung, a victim's typical reaction will be something like:Owww. Zark, that hurts.Then:Oh no. Look at this nasty red welt. I'm in the swimsuit competition later.And finally:What? I'm a latent misogynist with father issues!If a person is allergic to mandarin venom, one sting will prompt total self-awareness, leading to either immediate catatonia or a career as a talk show pundit.
Eoin Colfer
...friendship is something you do.
Nuala O'Faolain
Who can say for certain that he is sincere, who can say for certain that he believes? In the midst of of our deepest emotions we are acting a comedy with ourselves; within us one self is always mocking another self. - priscilla and emily lofte
George Moore
I know it's crazy to believe in silly things, but it's not that easy
kodaline
People who believe in buried gods,’ said Louis.‘Do you believe in buried gods, Detective Walsh?’‘I’m Episcopalian. I believe in everything.
John Connolly
To hell with you all, I DO believe
Cecelia Ahern
The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
George Bernard Shaw
As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
Oscar Wilde
You are lucky to feel sadness.
John O'Callaghan
I hope we meet again," said Ramman."I do too," Tel Hesani said, then added underneath his breath, "Although I fear it won't be in this world.
Darren Shan
But we know that we are no longer the same, and not only know that we are no longer the same, but know in what we are no longer the same, you wiser but not sadder, and I sadder but not wiser, for wiser I could hardly become without grave personal inconvenience, whereas sorrow is a thing you can keep on adding to all your life long, is it not, like a stamp or egg collection
Samuel Beckett
What am I supposed to do when the best part of me was always you?And what am I supposed to say when I'm all choked up and you're OK?I'm falling to pieces
The Script
How extraordinary the ordinary really is, a tool we all use to keep going, a template for sanity.
Cecelia Ahern
That long sigh again, above us. This time I saw it, moving through the branches. Like the trees were listening; like they would've been sad about us, sad for us, only they'd heard it all so many thousand times before.
Tana French
The lines of her face, turned up to the sky, would have broken your heart.
Tana French
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas - too sad story. This book is very good and sad
John Boyne
And to the little Squirrel who lived in the fir-tree, and was lonely, he said, 'Where is my mother?' And the Squirrel answered, 'Thou hast slain mine. Dost thou seek to slay thine also?
Oscar Wilde
I wasn't always who I am now. No one ever is. I've spent my entire lifetime becoming who I am. Finally, I'm here and I'm old. It's depressing, it really is.
Derek Landy
But no, now I see I never meant to Ben what Ben meant to me. If there was anything I said which resonated in return, he found a better speech elsewhere. My romance went no further than his coat.
Sara Baume
We stood side by side, and for that minute, in the stillness of that room, he was not the King. I was not not the Princess, taken against her will to the City. We were two people trying to forget.
Anna Carey
Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.
Elizabeth Bowen
I had spent my whole life feeling homesick. The only difference between the two of us was that I didn't know what or where home was.
Marian Keyes
Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.
James Joyce
Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.
Richard Chenevix Trench
its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent
Mark O'Connell
...that it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
Brian Friel
HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.
George Bernard Shaw
HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper - say on a canal barge...
George Bernard Shaw
Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.
Patrick Cockburn
A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere - no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift to articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton...
George Bernard Shaw
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
James Joyce