Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 40

Here God is not approached as an object that we must love, but as a mystery present in the very act of love itself.
Peter Rollins
We lie to protect our children, and in lying we expose them to the greatest of harms
John Connolly
She wouldn't have died if I hadn't taught her how to fall.
Jane Casey
Oh, I can't explain. When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life.
Oscar Wilde
There is no Mystery so great as Misery.
Oscar Wilde
There's only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things." Henry Higgins, Act V, Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw
It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret.
Oscar Wilde
She held out a small voice recorder. 'By the way, could you describe exactly how you felt at the moment of impact? I'm writing this short story--''Put that away, Hazel,' hissed Mam. 'The poor boy is in pain.'Hazel persisted. 'Would that be a white-hot pain? Or more of a dull throbbing pain?
Eoin Colfer
The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.
Oscar Wilde
Excuse me, Tex," the nurse said, hands on hips. 'Would you mind reining in the voice. There are babies being born in this hospital. We wouldn't want the first sound they hear to be your painful howling. There could be lawsuits.
Eoin Colfer
You still awake?' asked the anesthetist.'Nope,' I replied.
Eoin Colfer
Margaret took Patrick's hand in hers. "Now you two," she said, "isn't it time you gave me another grandchild? We can't have Sean growing up an only child, like Patrick."Patrick blushed and smiled as Margaret squeezed his knee. And Audra caught a glimpse of her function in the marriage, then. She shivered and counted the minutes until she could go home and retreat to the haze.
Haylen Beck
Listen to me," Audra said. "Listen good. You don't get to touch me anymore. Not ever. You don't own me, or my children. We are not your possessions. You never really loved our children, but I do. Now, I'm going to find Sean and Louise. You can either help me or get out of my way. Which is it?
Haylen Beck
In my experience, boys are predictable. As soon as they think of something, they do it. Girls are smarter—they plan ahead. They think about not getting caught.
Eoin Colfer
Every solution to every problem is simple. It's the distance between the two where the mystery lies.
Derek Landy
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.
Oscar Wilde
You ask me why I don’t love you, but surely you must believe I am very fond of you and if to desire to possess a person wholly, to admire and honour that person deeply, and to seek to secure that person’s happiness in every way is to “love” then perhaps my affection for you is a kind of love. I will tell you this that your soul seems to me to be the most beautiful and simple soul in the world and it may be because I am so conscious of this when I look at you that my love or affection for you loses much of its violence.
James Joyce
Regrets, Blacksmith, make poor currency. You can't but back with them what you most desire.
John Connolly
But somehow, I feel sure that if I lived in the country for six months, I should become so unsophisticated that no one would take the slightest notice of me.
Oscar Wilde
they comedifferent and the samewith each it is different and the samewith each the absence of love is differentwith each the absence of love is the same
Samuel Beckett
It had ever, as I told the reader, been one of the singular blessings of my life, to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with some one....
Laurence Sterne
Dying for dark - the darker the worse. Strange.
Samuel Beckett
I counsel you, put down in record even your doubts and surmises. Hereafter it may be of interest to you to see how true you guess. We learn from failure, not from success.
Bram Stoker
Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's part of any endeavour, not just writing.
Roddy Doyle
She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.
Elizabeth Bowen
What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.
Iris Murdoch
Failure is only the name that we give to our mistakes."-Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume—and no farther than to my first day's life—'tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it—on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back—
Laurence Sterne
And I felt like such a failure. I thought: I can't even do mental illness properly.
Sara Baume
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.—Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (1983)
Samuel Beckett
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.
James Joyce
But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk of the edge of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone's mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else's hands, so it won't weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.
Tana French
Well-known, alas, is the case of the poor German who was very fond of three and who made each aspect of his life a thing of triads. He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.
Flann O'Brien
I don't know why, but there's always the part of you, the part that hides in the shadows protecting the self-destruct button, that doesn't ever want to leave the dark behind.
Cecelia Ahern
The truth a fairly important thing to hold on to when you’ve been pulled out of the sea after wanting to drown in it. I could’ve let the sea take me. I could easily be dead now, which is funny when you think of it. When I say funny, what I actually mean is weird and kind of disturbing.When there’s the loud sound of a siren screaming in your head it doesn’t take too long before a feeling of not caring what happens washed over you and you become recklessly self- destructive. I used to be full of energy and happiness but I could barely remember those kinds of feelings. The cheerful, childish things I used to think had been replaced. A whole load of new realisations had begun to grow inside me like tangled weeds, and they were starting to kill me. That’s why I’d make the decision that involved heading ogg to the pier on my pike in the middle of the night and cycling off it.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
I steered by self as evenly as I could, and it was easier than I thought. My bike and I went shooting off the end, and together we well into the sea that’s cold and huge and doesn’t care whether living boys launch themselves into it or not.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
If her mind had held even the smallest chance of a future, she would have had no reason to tell me anything at all, whether or not it could send her to prison. But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk off the edges of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone's mind; or maybe all they want is is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else's hands, so it won't weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.
Tana French
For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren't waiting for.
Tana French
I think she was too tired to play anymore, she was in a hurry to get to Heaven so she didn't wait, why didn't she wait for me?
Emma Donoghue
(Looking at the tree) Pity we haven't got a bit of rope.
Samuel Beckett
The greatest gift a parent can give a child is self-confidence.
Stewart Stafford
It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.
Oscar Wilde
When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like.
Lucy Grealy
And yet it was not the mystery, but the comedy of suffering that struck him; its absolute uselessness, its grotesque want of meaning. How incoherent everything seemed! How lacking in all harmony! He was amazed at the discord between the shallow optimism of the day, and the real facts of existence. He was still very young.
Oscar Wilde
The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world... They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet... Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.
Oscar Wilde
There are some sufferings that we seem as a creature to forget, or we would never survive as a creature among all the other creatures.
Sebastian Barry
But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering ― curious as it may sound to you ― is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.
Oscar Wilde
Goodbye, Room." I wave up at Skylight. "Say goodbye," I tell Ma. "Goodbye, Room."Ma says it but on mute.I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the door.
Emma Donoghue
To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
Oscar Wilde
The past is not a place I like to visit. This project is forcing me to go there, to tidy up my thoughts. I'm not normally a navel-gazer. I've always thought you find yourself in other people. I'm visiting here. I don't want to set up house.
Bono
The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art.
Oscar Wilde
It's not being in the past, but accepting who we were and being who we are.
Roisin Turner
In the days when wishing was having, I got what I wished and then I wish I hadn't.
Emma Donoghue
One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.
Iris Murdoch
We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. That first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two spent cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing.
John Banville
Because to ignore what had happened in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders.
John Connolly
And then you’ll catch yourself thinking about something or someone who has no connection with the past. Someone who’s only yours. And you’ll realize… that this is where your life is.
Colm Tóibín
But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.
Iris Murdoch
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
Oscar Wilde