Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 45

And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.
Emma Donoghue
The tears I feel todayI'll wait to shed tomorrow.Though I'll not sleep this nightNor find surcease from sorrow.My eyes must keep their sight:I dare not be tear-blinded.I must be free to talkNot choked with grief, clear-minded.My mouth cannot betrayThe anguish that I know.Yes, I'll keep my tears til later:But my grief will never go.
Anne McCaffrey
...real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.
Emma Donoghue
It was the word 'late' that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn't happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere...
Emma Donoghue
His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her. What once was life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose.
Colm Tóibín
There is a deep sense in which we are all ghost towns. We are all haunted by the memory of those we love, those with whom we feel we have unfinished business. While they may no longer be with us, a faint aroma of their presence remains, a presence that haunts us until we make our peace with them and let them go. The problem, however, is that we tend to spend a great deal of energy in attempting to avoid the truth. We construct an image of ourselves that seeks to shield us from a confrontation with our ghosts. Hence we often encounter them only late at night, in the corridors of our dreams.
Peter Rollins
It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it
Oscar Wilde
A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them.... His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older.
Oscar Wilde
My mind couldn't fit itself around the shape of his absence.
Lia Mills
Utterly, irrevocably, lost
Oscar Wilde
Her bed felt huge and empty now, and when she slept, she did so with her arm around a pillow. She dreamed of him almost every night, sometimes good dreams of happy days and joyful times; often they were terrible dreams of abandonment, loss and sorrow. She didn't know which was worse: every morning she woke afresh to the knowledge that he was gone and he would never come back. It would never be all right again.
Maeve Binchy
Mid-Term BreakI sat all morning in the college sick bayCounting bells knelling classes to a close.At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.In the porch I met my father crying—He had always taken funerals in his stride—And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pramWhen I came in, and I was embarrassedBy old men standing up to shake my handAnd tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,Away at school, as my mother held my handIn hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.At ten o'clock the ambulance arrivedWith the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.Next morning I went up into the room. SnowdropsAnd candles soothed the bedside; I saw himFor the first time in six weeks. Paler now,Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.A four-foot box, a foot for every year.
Seamus Heaney
The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.
John Banville
The shovel worked in and out of the light beams as the dirt hit him in the stomach, on his back, fell into his ears, his eyes, as I covered him along with the things that had made him: his walks, his rest, his eating when hungry, the stars he watched sometimes, the first day I brought him home, the first time he saw snow, and every second of his friendship, what he took with him into silence and stillness ...
Gerard Donovan
And then he went in the evening up to the nursery and told the boy how his mother was gone for a while to Elfland, to her father's palace (which may only be told of in song). And, unheeding any words of Orion then, he held on with the brief tale that he had come to tell, and told how Elfland was gone."But that cannot be," said Orion, "for I hear the horns of Elfland every day.""You can hear them?" Alveric said.And the boy replied, "I hear them blowing at evening.
Lord Dunsany
Life… has a way of testing the fault line
Josephine Hart
It must be terrible to be old, when you love someone who died young. They never change in your mind, and every day you see yourself grow away from that person you were when you loved and knew them. Until you are more of a shadow than they are, and the girl you were is altogether gone, more dead even than that young man on the battlefield.
Paul Kearney
Every first is a loss.
Moïra Fowley-Doyle
Sometimes the hardest thing is admitting you were wrong. It’s hard to say you need to be forgiven.
Jane Casey
Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back time and bring the dead to life? None. None possible, not in the real world. And yet in my imaginings I can clearly see this cleansed new creature steaming up out of myself like a proselyte rising drenched from the baptismal river amid glad cries.
John Banville
Forgiveness doesn’t make one person better, or the other guy smaller. Forgiving is just letting go. It’s turning back toward being what we really are.
Edward Fahey
To heal would be to open the wound,examine it and forgive
Maeve Binchy
Amo amas amat amamus amatis amant amavi amavisti amavit amavimus amavistis amaverunt amavero amaveris amaverit… Everything was love. Everything will be love. Everything has been love. Everything would be love. Everything would have been love. Ah, that was it, the truth at last. Everything would have been love. The huge eye, which had become an immense sphere, was gently breathing, only it was not an eye nor a sphere but a great wonderful animal covered in little waving legs like hairs, waving oh so gently as if they were under water. All shall be well and all shall be well said the ocean. So the place of reconciliation existed after all, not like a little knot hole in a cupboard but flowing everywhere and being everything. I had only to will it and it would be, for spirit is omnipotent only I never knew it, like being able to walk on the air. I could forgive. I could be forgiven. I could forgive. Perhaps that was the whole of it after all. Perhaps being forgiven was just forgiving only no one had ever told me. There was nothing else needful. Just to forgive. Forgiving equals being forgiven, the secret of the universe, do not whatever you do forget it. The past was folded up and in the twinkling of an eye everything had been changed and made beautiful and good.
Iris Murdoch
To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius.
Joyce Cary
So how long have you been together? Two months?''Five.''Five? Jesus, Steve, you might as well get married. I should buy a hat.''Don't. They give away your Spock ears.'She laughed. 'This is the Romanian girl?''Croatian.''Right. She's a painter?''Photographer.''Right.' She studied him.'What?' he laughed self-consciously as though he was a twelve-year-old boy who'd just been caught with his first girlfriend.'Nothing.''Come on.''I don't know Steve,' she cut into her meat, 'you've changed. You no longer write about Victoria Beckham and you have a girlfriend. I think...''You think what?''I don't know, I might be jumping the gun here, but I think there's a possibility you might not be gay after all.'A chip was hurled at her head.
Cecelia Ahern
Maybe the Buddha was right: pain and suffering are the only true constants in life.
Dermot Davis
Could the entire notion of finding one’s soul mate be a simple case of looking for ourselves in another body? Is the “soul mate” really just the best approximation of ourselves that we can find?
Dermot Davis
Romantic love has its place but to define relationship solely in romantic terms is like describing marriage only by what a couple does on their honeymoon.
Dermot Davis
Someone once said that nostalgia is longing for a place you’d never go back to and thinking about it… that’s pretty much how I’m feeling about my ex-husband: longing for someone I’d never go back to.
Dermot Davis
What’s interesting about the relationship between gay men and women is there can be a lot of affection, but there’s a line that you don’t cross.
Michael Carroll
So that was where we were in our relationship.Derwent’s scale ran all the way from wouldn’t piss-on-you-if-you-were-on-fire to would-kill-for-you-no-need-to-ask-twice. I was quite glad to be somewhere near the middle.
Jane Casey
After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty.
John Connolly
I happened to look up and there it was. All over and done with, at last. I sat on for a few moments with the ball in my hand and the dog yelping and pawing at me. (Pause.) Moments. Her moments, my moments (Pause.) The dog's moments.
Samuel Beckett
I asked her to look at me and after a few moments - (pause) - after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low) Let me in.
Samuel Beckett
How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.
Samuel Beckett
You can have your secret as long as I have your heart[.]
Oscar Wilde
It's too good, she is. She wants to find the good in others, and sometimes her way of finding that is to trust them, hoping she'll not be disappointed but she sometimes is.
Claire Keegan
Never trust an Italian. The Nazis did that, and look where it got them.
Paul Murray
Trust is nothing when you have it. It's bread and milk. Basic. There's no glamour, no emotion, no drama - you just trust and that's it. Trusting someone is boring. It's a non-event. But take it away - try living without trust and suddenly your relationship is plunged into a living hellhole.
Kate Kerrigan
In the end, it's only a story of having had her words and secrets, her confidences, turned against her by someone she once believed entirely beyond any acts of betrayal. A story of pettiness and cruelty and of the lies friends will tell when a friendship has ceased to be profitable or convenient. It is a very simple and inexpressibly complex story of cowardice...
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Never trust a man who sits, uninvited, at the head of the table in another man's home.
Cecelia Ahern
The trust of those in dark need is forgiving work.
Sebastian Barry
It's still very difficult for me to rely. Your weakness, the blessing of your weakness is it forces you into friendships. The things that you lack, you look for in others.
Bono
Trust that man in nothing who has not a conscience in everything.
Laurence Sterne
His [Faraday's] third great discovery is the Magnetization of Light, which I should liken to the Weisshorn among mountains-high, beautiful, and alone.
John Tyndall
Hope, like the gleaming taper’s light, adorns and cheers our way; and still, as darker grows the night, emits a brighter ray.
Oliver Goldsmith
There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.
Bram Stoker
It is also important to understand that, even though you have been taught to believe that your mind is in charge of life, it was not designed for this. It is an exquisite tool for maneuvering through your life, but it is not supposed to be in charge of it. Life is in charge of your life, and it does a lot better job than your mind does.
Mary O'Malley
It is my intent to beget a good understanding between the chymists and the mechanical philosophers who have hitherto been too little acquainted with one another's learning.
Robert Boyle
Don’t listen to advice. Give yourself the freedom to make your own errors, it’s the only way you’ll learn.
Stewart Stafford
You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow and its beauty.
Oscar Wilde
A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.
George Bernard Shaw
Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.
George Bernard Shaw
To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.
James Joyce
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
Oscar Wilde
Policeman says, "Son you can't stay here"I said, "There's someone I'm waiting for if it's a day, a month, a year"Gotta stand my ground even if it rains or snowsIf she changes her mind this is the first place she will go
The Script
Here we go again. Always a few drinks, but sometimes even sober, we play the unhappiness game; endlessly round and round. Ding dong. Tighter and tighter. On and on. Push me pull you. Come here and i'll tell you how much i hate you. Hang on a minute while i leave you. All the while we know we are missing the point, whatever the point used to be.
Anne Enright
What is a life?" Scapegrace continued. "Is life merely living? Is it having a heartbeat? Or is life the effect you have on others? Is it the effect you have on the world around you? If so, what have I done with mine? How have I wasted it?
Derek Landy
We can all have plenty of lives, but there are limits. You never can tell what they are.
Colm Tóibín
And, certainly to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.
Oscar Wilde