Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 48

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
George Bernard Shaw
I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best.
Oscar Wilde
Life in general was cruel and offered only different types of voids and chaos. The only way to tolerate it, to have any hope of escaping it, I reasoned, was to know my own strength, to defy life by surviving it.
Lucy Grealy
It is one thing to be brave in front of others, perhaps for fear of being branded a coward and becoming diminished in their eyes, but another entirely to be brave when there is nobody to witness your courage. The latter is an elemental bravery, a strength of spirit and character.
John Connolly
Although I felt very weak, I did not feel ill; and strength, one always fancies, is a thing that may be picked up when we please.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Because of course, for every revelation of weakness, there had to be an equal and opposite show of strength.
Jane Casey
Was that his name? I never had a chance to ask. He was too intent upon tearing out my throat for us to engage in idle chitchat.
John Connolly
Dancy closes her eyes, remembering all the times that have been so much worse than this, all the horror and shame and sorrow to give her strength. The burning parts of her no one and nothing can ever touch, the fire where her soul used to be.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Though I’m tempted by the call of the sea, I resist. It can’t claim me.In a way I’m stronger than the waves and I feel good about that.
Darren Shan
Conscience is a coward, and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse.
Oliver Goldsmith
Our toil must be in silence, and our efforts all in secret; for this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be his greatest strength.
Bram Stoker
The moment will arrive when you are comfortable with who you are, and what you are– bald or old or fat or poor, successful or struggling- when you don't feel the need to apologize for anything or to deny anything. To be comfortable in your own skin is the beginning of strength.
Charles B. Handy
He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.
John Banville
A small amount of good literature can often teach more about the inner life than volumes of psychology.
Thomas Moore
Writing is a series of verbal suggestions designed to provoke a psychological reaction and an aesthetic experience.
Stewart Stafford
Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.
Oscar Wilde
It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.
Oscar Wilde
Man is many things, but he is not rational.
Oscar Wilde
As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy withwhich we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live,including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament, because we are never satisfied with them.... At the elections some candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is impossible. Things will not stay as they are.Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years in school, oldage and widows’ pensions, votes for women, and short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers’ wigs in the courts are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever shall be; but their great-grandmothers would have set down anyone who told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted them to come as wicked.
George Bernard Shaw
Society--civilized society, at least--is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef ... Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees...
Oscar Wilde
Society is indeed a contract. ... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.
Edmund Burke
We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces
Oscar Wilde
That time is long gone. But aren't we still the same people?
Donal Ryan
The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights. But over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognition into a generalized demand for attention and the anger at specific injustice into a generalized feeling of grievance and resentment. The result is a culture of entitlement, attention-seeking and complaint.
Michael Foley
There’s no escaping it,” he’d been fond of telling us when he was well, “the way you look defines who you are. You might argue for your soul, or your heart, but everyone else in the world will judge you on your big nose or your weak chin. Six billion people could be wrong, but you’ll never get them to admit it.
Paul Murray
The importance of humor is primarily to puncture fixed ideas—to make us step back and realize that our situation, whatever it may be, is, in the grand scheme of things, always contingent and arbitrary and ephemeral. And that helps us to deal with our emotions and to keep going. Holding on to one perspective, on the other hand, whether it takes the form of grief or anger or a particular political standpoint, is often destructive to us and to those around us
Paul Murray
Society is indeed a contract ... it becomes a participant not only between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
Edmund Burke
In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.Also everywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the things all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.
Emma Donoghue
The tattoo is there not because I believe there is something wrong with me. It's there to remind me that our flaws are our strengths
Cecelia Ahern
Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.
Oscar Wilde
Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.
Oscar Wilde
We’ve become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we’re so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.
Tana French
You are a cynical man, Mr. Pleasant.""We live in cynical times, Miss Cain.
Derek Landy
Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
George Bernard Shaw
The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out.
George Bernard Shaw
Outside the family circle, papa, I'm glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man.
Oscar Wilde
She catches sight of herself in her video-feed, her face contorted with fury. Wiping spittle from the sides of her mouth, she reaches behind her to grab her lip gloss and reapplies it. “And don’t even start thinking about what a bitch I am,” she says. Her eyes are steady, the heat receding from her skin. “This is not my fault. I’m just doing what we have been trained to do. This is who we are, freida. This is who we were designed to be.
Louise O'Neill
We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle. When I was writing this novel, friend after friend came to me telling me of something that had happened to them. A hand up their skirt, a boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer, a night where they were too drunk to give consent but they think it was taken from them anyway. We shared these stories with one another and it was as if we were discussing some essential part of being a woman, like period cramps or contraceptives. Every woman or girl who told me these stories had one thing in common: shame. ‘I was drunk . . . I brought him back to my house . . . I fell asleep at that party . . . I froze and I didn’t tell him to stop . . .’ My fault. My fault. My fault. When I asked these women if they had reported what had happened to the police, only one out of twenty women said yes. The others looked at me and said, ‘No. How could I have proved it? Who would have believed me?’ And I didn’t have any answer for that.
Louise O'Neill
our society is unequal, and bodily difference is used to justify that inequality.
Emer O'Toole
Even within our culture, there are times when breasts stop being read as bouncy sex balls: when women are breastfeeding, there's pretty wide acceptance of the fact that shouting 'phwoar' is bad form.
Emer O'Toole
The pop culture cliché of the American High School movie, which adapted old archetypes, depicted a social world in which the worst sexists were always the all brawn no brains sports jock. But now that the online world has given us a glimpse into the inner lives of others, one of the surprising revelations is that it is the nerdish self-identifying nice guy who could never get the girl who has been exposed as the much more hate-filled, racist, misogynist who is insanely jealous of the happiness of others.
Angela Nagle
What is whiter than snow?' he said. 'The truth,' said Grania.'What is the best colour?' said Finn. 'The colour of childhood,' said she.'What is hotter than fire?' 'The face of a hospitable man when he sees a stranger coming in, and the house empty.''What has a taste more bitter than poison?' 'The reproach of an enemy.''What is best for a champion?' 'His doings to be high, and his pride to be low.''What is the best of jewels?' 'A knife.''What is sharper than a sword?' 'The wit of a woman between two men.''What is quicker than the wind?' said Finn then. 'A woman’s mind,' said Grania. And indeed she was telling no lie when she said that.
Lady Augusta Gregory
Well, speaking as a feminist, I'm glad that women can lead--uh, groups of unspeakable magical evil.""Yes," Alan said gravely. "It'd be shoking if the evil magicians were sexist. For one thing, that would mean they were stupid, and having stupid enemies would be a terrible blow to my manly pride.
Sarah Rees Brennan
I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
Mary Harris Jones
Any subject we exclude from fiction will drop from our culture's memory.
Emma Donoghue
What are you doing with all these books?" I asked, stepping towards a tall stack on the floor. I ran my fingers down the spines, recognizing a few familiar titles from School: Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, and To the Lighthouse.Caleb came beside me, his warm shoulder brushing against mine. "I do this funny thing sometimes," she said, shooting me a mischievous grin. "I open a book, and I look at each page. It's called reading
Anna Carey
A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth.
Declan Kiberd
…progress isn't necessarily about change but about things turning out as we want them to
Phil Hogan
for I determined that if Death came he should find me ready
Bram Stoker
How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.
John Banville
Darkness crept through. Shadows pried at doors, teased dull edges of recollections that never quite took hold. Memories that would have shriveled under the blinding sun of daylight. And reason.
Edward Fahey
Well, I didn't really know what to say. So maybe I should say that I have thought about you and I like you, I like seeing you, I care for you and maybe I love you too. And the next time if you tell me you love me, I'll--" She stopped."You'll what?""I'll say I love you too.
Colm Tóibín
If your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Instead, I read books in the library, huddling on a bean bag in a corner and getting lost in somebody else's victories and troubles. I never had much time for fiction before. I preferred real life. Mathematics. Solutions. Things that actually have a bearing on my life. But I can understand now why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they are not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings the book closes and I'm plunged back into reality.
Cecelia Ahern
Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.
John Connolly
I'll tell you a story about Johnny Magory!
Emma-Jane Leeson
He'd never known he had so much fight in him. Never known he could be capable of so much... He was going to change the world.
Ethel Rohan
Marian was suddenly overcome by an appalling crippling panic. She was very frightened at the idea of arriving. But it was more than that. She feared the rocks and the cliffs and the grotesque dolmen and the ancient secret things. Her two companions seemed no longer reassuring but dreadfully alien and even sinister. She felt, for the first time in her life, completely isolated and in danger. She became in an instant almost faint with terror.She said, as a cry for help, ‘I’m feeling terribly nervous’.‘I know you are,’ said Scottow.(…)Marian was appalled at the sudden quietness. But the insane panic had left her. She was frightened now in an ordinary way, sick in her stomach, shy, tongue-tied, horribly aware of the onset of a new world.
Iris Murdoch
One thing an early-on writer has to learn, is to be comfortable with and responsive to critique. When five people in a group tell you this chapter sucks; don’t snap back at them with, “Sure, but it gets better in another 6 or 7 chapters!”Listen. – Thank them. – Consider.They can look from a fresh perspective, and catch things that you might be too close to see.But, you will also learn along the way that not everyone in a group of relative amateurs themselves, is going to catch everything, and there will be a few who seem to never understand much of anything.Some will always want paragraphs chopped down to explosive missiles of passion, while others are more used to long composite paragraphs that I myself find impossible to wade through.You may, once you have hit your full stride and power, feel comfortable telling a few of them, “Look. This isn’t a diner. I don’t take orders: ‘I’m gluten intolerant; he can’t do salt; she’s allergic to peanuts ...’“If what I offer is a salad bar, then No; I am not going to fry you up a cheesesteak!
Edward Fahey
There’s an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don’t notice at what point that you’re actually overwhelmed by this. There’s no showiness, at all. It’s the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have a notion of where the beauty was.(Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.)
Colm Tóibín