Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 41

It’s not easy remembering the good times.
Cecelia Ahern
Tell me your past, my beloved, for a man is his past, and is to be known by it.
James Stephens
The past beats inside me like a second heart.
John Banville
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
Oscar Wilde
When you‟re taught from birth that you don‟t matter in any way, that your wants and even needs are irrelevant, then of course you‟ll struggle to value yourself.
Danu Morrigan
Never shall a young man,Thrown into despairBy those great honey-colouredRamparts at your ear,Love you for yourself aloneAnd not your yellow hair.
W.B. Yeats
You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here, because they would find no peace elsewhere. In this place, they are understood. In this place, their faults have meaning. In this place, they belong.
John Connolly
And if ever I'm reduced to looking for a meaning to my life, you never can tell, it's in that old mess I'll stick my nose to begin with, the mess of that poor old uniparous whore and myself the last of my foul brood, neither man nor beast.
Samuel Beckett
The parts of our lives when we write them down seem to belong in different books, by different writers even. What all these bits and pieces make up I don't know. There is no plot. Perhaps meaning is something we invent afterward, putting it all together, like imagined God.
Niall Williams
Unless you know the code, it has no meaning.
John Connolly
On the floor beside the spare pillow that had tumbled from the bed in her sleep was a single yellow flower. Five heart-shaped petals. As fresh and as pure as if it were in full bloom in a summer meadow.Drowsy and mind-fogged, she crept downstairs to look for a book on Irish wildflowers. It took her a while to find anything that resembled the yellow flower, but eventually she found an image and description that matched: "Cinquefoil, a flower renowned for its healing properties and a flower also said to be favored by fairy folk. Meanings associated with it include money, protection, sleep, prophetic dreams, and beloved daughter.
Hazel Gaynor
[I]f you set out to mention everything you would never be done, and that's what counts, to be done, to have done. Oh, I know, even when you mention only a few of the things there are you do not get done either, I know, I know. But it's a change of muck. And if all muck is the same muck that doesn't matter, it's good to have a change of muck, to move from one heap to another, from time to time, fluttering you might say, like a butterfly, as if you were ephemeral.
Samuel Beckett
Your Heart's Desire is the Voice of God, and that Voice must be obeyed sooner or later.
Emmet Fox
Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?
Oscar Wilde
Your mind is a treasure house that you should stock well and it’s the one part of you the world can’t interfere with.
Frank McCourt
Since I am never alone with myself. Since I am always watching the character playing my part in the scene, there is no possibility of spontaneity.
Ronan Bennett
I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.
John Banville
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth
Oscar Wilde
Why, isabel? Why are you doing this to yourself? To your
Louise O'Neill
Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again. So even though it sometimes feels as if one could just about die from disappointment I must concede that in fact in a rather perverse way it is precisely those things I did not get that are keeping me alive.
Claire-Louise Bennett
To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.
Oscar Wilde
It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.
Sara Baume
Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.)
Samuel Beckett
He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glasses.
James Joyce
The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness around me I feel less alone. (Pause.) In a way. (Pause.) I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to... (hesitates) ...me. (Pause.)
Samuel Beckett
In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.
Oscar Wilde
You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone 'Give me the gun', etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone's asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don't mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg - that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you'd imagined,that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of 'life'.
Paul Murray
My dear fellow, it isn't easy to be anything nowadays. There's such a lot of beastly competition about.
Oscar Wilde
If the goal you've set for yourself has a 100 percent chance of success, then frankly you aren't aiming high enough.
Benny Lewis
People will kill you. Over time. They will shave out every last morsel of fun in you with little, harmless sounding phrases that people uses every day, like: 'Be realis
Dylan Moran
If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.
Oscar Wilde
I can’t imagine how hard it is to let someone be your shoulder to lie on, when all you’ve known is being the strong one.” Alec reached over and took my hand in his.“You’ve always been strong for Bee, then for each of us when our individual bullshit came back to bite us in the ass. You’re incredible, Bran, and we don’t mean to pester you, we just want to show you that we’re here for you like you’re always there for us.
L.A. Casey
Maybe you have to live under cover for a while before you can find your true character.
Hugo Hamilton
Paulette had never been flush with self-confidence. People took that as humility, but humility isn’t painful and crippling. She hadn’t yet learned that humble and self-destructive aren’t the same thing at all. They’re not even on the same team. - From "The Gardens of Ailana" handbook for healers & mystics
Edward Fahey
Broken hearts show us we’ve grown out of one stage, by ripping us wide open for the next.We’re forced to choose what we do with all that pain: turn it against ourselves, aim it at someone else, or tap all that power and reach higher.
Edward Fahey
Life is about trying to find our ways back to our one shared soul. When we’re looking out at the stars, we’re looking into ourselves.
Edward Fahey
Ancient philosophers and spiritual teachers were explorers. They wanted us to be as well. They thought we should understand this physical world, but not get stuck here. For thousands of years we have shared their insights, over-analyzed and repeated their words; quoting and re-translating until all meaning has been lost. These great minds, great souls, great beings sought to be jumping off points, not merely the originators of emptied out and desiccated clichés. They wanted to be doorways, not doorstops.
Edward Fahey
By the Hospital Lane goes the 'Faeries Path.' Every evening they travel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. At the sea end of their path stands a cottage. One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who lived there, left her door open, as she was expecting her son. Her husband was asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. After he had been sitting there for a while, the woman said, 'In the name of God, who are you?' He got up and went out, saying, 'Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.' She woke her husband and told him. 'One of the good people has been with us,' said he. ("Village Ghosts")
W.B. Yeats
It's not the job of this town to make me feel happy. It's not this town´s fault that I don't feel I fit in. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, because it's about where you are in your head. It's about the other world I inhabit. The world of dreams, hope, imagination, and memories. I'm happy up here, and because of that I'm happy up there too
Cecelia Ahern
The emptiness made her insides ache.
Anna McPartlin
But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would ne be disturbed. The gap between these two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and experiencing singly and alone it own pain or fear or pleasure or complacency.
Colm Tóibín
I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.
Edna O'Brien
And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. "I must break in on all this," she thought as she looked around the room.
Elizabeth Bowen
—Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend.—I will take the risk, said Stephen.—And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.
James Joyce
What could he be thinking of? He seemed to be trying to remember something, perhaps an engagement, perhaps an excuse to leave her. For eventually, they all made some excuse.
Brian Moore
And the bell jangled, the driver started. The bus whirled off, to the last stop, the lonely room, the lonely night.
Brian Moore
None of them could help her. She had lost all of them. They would not find out about this; she would not put it into a letter. And because of this she understood that they would never know her now. Maybe, she thought, they had never known her, any of them, because if they had, then they would have had to realize what this would be like for her.
Colm Tóibín
See how community is only a good thing when you're a part of it.
Sara Baume
He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast.
James Joyce
I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.
Michael Collins
Estragon: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy.
Samuel Beckett
I have a mouth for kisses / No one to give or to take / I have a heart in my bosom / Beating for nobody's sake.
Lana Citron
The problem with living so long is that we get used to it. We watch the mortals age and wither and die around us, watch the world change and decay...but no matter the hardship or the pain or the sorrow we suffer, we choose to continue living. Out of sheer habit, I think.
Derek Landy
I learned the strange art of loneliness, the weathered yearning that swells and passes, and swells and passes, when you walk a trail alone.
Anna Carey
You do not have to be alone. The world never inflicts loneliness upon us. That is something we choose or reject by ourselves.
Darren Shan
God is the source of my supply. His riches flow to me freely, copiously, and abundantly. All my financial and other needs are met at every moment of time and point of space; there is always a divine surplus.
Joseph Murphy
I decided I would teach Mrs. P. a lesson by cooking my own meal.
Paul Murray
There was nothing wrong with having an expensive home, nothing wrong at all. There’s a pride in building something up, working hard to achieve something. But it shouldn’t have been his manhood that increased with each new success, it should have been his heart. His success was like the witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ fairy tale: it fed him for all the wrong reasons, fattening him in all the wrong places. Dad deserved his success, he just needed a masterclass in humility. I could have done with one too. How special I thought I was in the silver Aston Martin in which he drove me to school some mornings. How special am I now, now that somebody bought it from a depot of reprocessed cars, for a fraction of the price. How special indeed
Cecelia Ahern
I saw myself as reviving a certain mode of life, a mode that had been almost lost: the contemplative life of the country gentleman, in harmony with his status and history. In Renaissance times they had called it sprezzatura. The idea was to do whatever one did with grace, to imbue one’s every action with beauty, while at the same time making it look quite effortless. Thus, if one were to work at, say, law, one should raise it to the level of an art; if one were to laze, then one must laze beautifully. This, they said, was the true meaning of being an aristocrat.
Paul Murray
Mrs. P.? Oh no. She’s the help. Bosnian, you know. Or is it Serbian? An absolute treasure, anyway. As I always say to Bel, if there’s one good thing to come out of all this fuss in the Balkans, it’s the availability of quality staff . . .” The words died away on my lips: once again I found myself trailing off in the stare of those unblinking eyes. This fellow was like some kind of after-dinner black hole. My anxiety began to mount again.
Paul Murray