Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 37

The English language is the tongue now current in England and her colonies throughout the world and also throughout the greater part of the United States of America. It sprang from the German tongue spoken by the Teutons, who came over to Britain after the conquest of that country by the Romans. These Teutons comprised Angles, Saxons, Jutes and several other tribes from the northern part of Germany. They spoke different dialects, but these became blended in the new country, and the composite tongue came to be known as the Anglo-Saxon which has been the main basis for the language as at present constituted and is still the prevailing element.
Joseph Devlin
All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us - and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.
Iris Murdoch
The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is how high you raise your foot.
Benny Lewis
I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a visual memory for words ever succeeds in spelling conventionally, however highly educated he or she may be.
George Bernard Shaw
Up and down' is Irish for anything at all--from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.
Anne Enright
There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.
Jack Lynch
When people are warm, they cannot stand picking terms.
Maria Edgeworth
I know your head aches. I know you're tired. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher's window. But think what you're trying to accomplish - just think what you're dealing with. The majesty and grandeur of the English language; it's the greatest possession we have. The noblest thoughts that ever flowed through the hearts of men are contained in its extraordinary, imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds. And that's what you've set yourself out to conquer, Eliza. And conquer it you will.
George Bernard Shaw
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
George Bernard Shaw
Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.
Pádraic Pearse
Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.
Iris Murdoch
It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.
Oscar Wilde
I have lived to see that being seventeen is no protection against becoming seventy, but to know this needs the experience of a lifetime, for no imagination copes with it.
Lord Dunsany
Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul.
Niall Williams
Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
Experience is the name we give to our mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
When you see something, it can’t be unseen. When you hear a sound, it can never be unheard. I know, deep down, that this evening I have learned something that can never be unlearned. And the part of my world that is altered will never be the same.
Cecelia Ahern
Experience is a question of instinct about life.
Oscar Wilde
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
George Bernard Shaw
We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
Oscar Wilde
Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
James Joyce
I went out to the hazel woodbecause a fire was in my headcut and peeled a hazel wandand hooked a berry to a threadand when white moths were on the wingand moth-like stars were flickering outI dropped the berry in a stream,and caught a little silver trout....(Song of Wandering Aengus)
W.B. Yeats
About your easy heads my prayersI said with syllables of clay.What gift, I asked, shall I bring nowBefore I weep and walk away?Take, they replied, the oak and laurel.Take our fortune of tears and liveLike a spendthrift lover. All we askIs the one gift you cannot give.
Tana French
Ah dearest heart if you will but waitI'll become the ideal soulmatenevermore causing you a moment's troubleand I but a mere ectoplasmic bubbleswaying above your gorgeous headgruff and garrulous and safely dead.
Christy Brown
Shall the dire day break when lifefinds us merely husband and wifewith passion not so much deniedas neatly laundered and put asideand the old joyous insistencetrimmed to placid coexistence?Shall we sometime arise from bedwith not a carnal thought in our headlook at each other without surpriseout of wide awake uncandid eyestouch and know no immediate urgewhere all mysteries converge?Speak for the sake of something to sayand now and then put on a displayof elaborate mimicry of the past to provethat ritual reigns where once ruled loveand calmly observe those bleak ritesthat once made splendour of our nights?Dear, when we stop being outrageousand no longer find contagiousthe innumerable ecstasies we findin rise of hand or leap of mind - not now or then, love, need we fear
Christy Brown
More than loud acclaim, I loveBooks, silence, thought, my alcove.Pangur BánPoem by Anon Irish Monk, Translated by Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
The way you walk is slash and burn.Like understatement's now a crime.
Justin Quinn
Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,Which I gaze on so fondly to-day,Were to change by to-morrow, and fleet in my arms,Live fairy-gifts fading away,Thou wouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art,Let thy loveliness fade as it will,And around the dear ruin each wish of my heartWould entwine itself verdantly still.It is not while beauty and youth are thine own,And thy cheeks unprofaned by a tear,That the fervor and faith of a soul may be known,To which time will but make thee more dear!No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets,But as truly loves on to the close,As the sunflower turns on her god when he setsThe same look which she turned when he rose!
Thomas Moore
An Irish Airman foresees his DeathI Know that I shall meet my fatet Somewhere among the clouds above;t Those that I fight I do not hatet Those that I guard I do not love, My country is Kiltartan Cross,My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,t No likely end could bring them losst Or leave them happier than before.t Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,t Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,t A lonely impulse of delightt Drove to this tumult in the clouds;t I balanced all, brought all to mind,t The years to come seemed waste of breath,A waste of breath the years behindt In balance with this life, this death.
W.B. Yeats
I must take action of some sort whilst the courage of the day is upon me.
Bram Stoker
Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
Oscar Wilde
Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves?
Oscar Wilde
Science Fiction is a safe, fertile arena in which to rehearse the potential scientific facts of tomorrow
Stewart Stafford
And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand.
Oscar Wilde
When we have learnt to call storms, storms, and death, death, and birth, birth, when we have mastered the sailor's horn-book and Mr Piddington's law of cyclones, Ellis's anatomy and Lewer's midwifery, we have already made ourself half blind. We have become hypnotized by words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas; the commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is half crushed.
Henry de Vere Stacpoole
There is reason that all things are as they are, and did you see with my eyes and know with my knowledge, you would perhaps better understand.
Bram Stoker
As soon as she says this, I realize she is just like everyone else, and wish I was back at home so that all the things I do not understand could be the same as they always are.
Claire Keegan
Knowledge is a matter of knowing facts. Wisdom is a matter of understanding and applying principles. A certain amount of knowledge is necessary for wisdom, and without wisdom, knowledge is not only useless, it's dangerous.
Hilda van Stockum
It's a blindness thing, faith.
Niall Williams
Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
These friends - and he laid his hand on some of the books - have been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.
Bram Stoker
And when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him.
Bram Stoker
preserve my sanity, for to this I am reduced. Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past. Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for, that I may not go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already. If I be sane, then surely it is maddening to think that of all the foul things that lurk in this hateful place.
Bram Stoker
The cabin in the woods is to the American Gothic what the haunted castle is to the European - the seed from which everything else ultimately grows.
Bernice M Murphy Dr
Are we to have nothing tonight?" said one of them, with a low laugh, as she pointed to the bag which he had thrown upon the floor, and which moved as though there were some living thing within it. For answer he nodded his head. One of the women jumped forward and opened it. If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low wail, as of a half smothered child. The women closed round, whilst I was aghast with horror. But as I looked, they disappeared, and with them the dreadful bag.
Bram Stoker
The precautions of nervous people re infectious, and persons of a like temperament are pretty sure, after a time, to imitate them.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
But curiosity is a restless and unscrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Even in death, may you be triumphant
Darren Shan
Gosnell turned almost no one away from the Women’s Medical Society clinic. This is not meant as a compliment. Repentant Gosnell employee Adrienne Moton testified he would perform abortions on any girls or women with no concern about the age of their babies. The only times she could recall Gosnell refusing to perform an abortion was when somebody’s Social Security number couldn’t be verified. In those cases, Gosnell was worried that the “patient” was an undercover cop.
Ann McElhinney
It is only when a man feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understand their true import.
Bram Stoker
If that other fellow doesn't know his happiness, well, he'd better look for it soon, or he'll have to deal with me.
Bram Stoker
Mademoiselle De Lafontaine – in right of her father, who was a German, assumed to be psychological, metaphysical and something of a mystic – now declared that when the moon shone with a light so intense it was well known that it indicated a special spiritual activity. The effect of the full moon in such a state of brilliancy was manifold. It acted on dreams, it acted on lunacy, it acted on nervous people; it had marvelous physical influences connected with life. Mademoiselle related that here cousin, who was mate of a merchant ship, having taken a nap on deck on such a night, lying on his back, with his face full in the light of the moon, had wakened, after a dream of an old woman clawing him by the cheek, with his features horribly drawn to one side; and his countenance had never quite recovered its equilibrium.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Finch was his own country, the government unstable, the population volatile.
Kealan Patrick Burke
My feelings for Raphael are mine, and mine alone. I loved him, and that is all anyone needs to know. The rest is no business of any man's.
John Connolly
I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us. A personal experience has intensified rather than diminished that idea.
Bram Stoker
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling .... When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and [yet] with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.
Edmund Burke
Horror itself is a bit of a bullied genre, the antagonist being literary snobbery and public misconception. And I think good horror tackles our darkest fears, whatever they may be. It takes us into the minds of the victims, explores the threats, disseminates fear, studies how it changes us. It pulls back the curtain on the ugly underbelly of society, tears away the masks the monsters wear out in the world, shows us the potential truth of the human condition. Horror is truth, unflinching and honest. Not everybody wants to see that, but good horror ensures that it's there to be seen.
Kealan Patrick Burke
But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu