Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 50

It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things.
Oscar Wilde
Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.
George Bernard Shaw
Since when has love ever looked for reasons, or evidence? Why would love bow to the reality of things, when it creates a reality of its own, so much more vivid, wherein everything resonates to the key of the heart?
Paul Murray
Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.
Oscar Wilde
The thing about real life is, when you do something stupid, it normally costs you. In books the heroes can make as many mistakes as they like. It doesn't matter what they do, because everything works out in the end. They'll beat the bad guys and put things right and everything ends up cool.In real life, vacuum cleaners kill spiders. If you cross a busy road without looking, you get whacked by a car. If you fall from a tree, you break some bones. Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins. I just wanted to make that clear before I begun.
Darren Shan
What is a life lived without passion? he asked himself. And what is passion, but a yearning of the soul for recognition and self-expression? The beauty within seeks beauty without.
Dermot Davis
It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new - again more by accident than design.
Michael Foley
I wanted to do this properly, but I look at you and I forget...
Abby Green
Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. 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
How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long—the care of cares—the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven—and straight you find a new stratum there. As physical science tells us no fluid is without its skin, so does it seem with this fine medium of the soul, and these successive films of care that form upon its surface on mere contact with the upper air and light.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity?
Oscar Wilde
You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.
Oscar Wilde
Men and women find all sorts of ways to be together, all sorts of ways. Yours was high and dangerous. Most of us stay on the lower paths.
Josephine Hart
It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.
Edmund Burke
Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there.
Bernie Mcgill
His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.
Oscar Wilde
The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
Oscar Wilde
Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
Oscar Wilde
One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
James Joyce
At least half of his hunters writhed on the ground with grubs already inside them, causing horrendous agony. These had to be helped away by terrified Ship People whose courage lay trembling in their hearts as lightly as leaves.
Peadar Ó Guilín
The most painful moment in my life also became the moment I showed the most strength and courage.
Cecelia Ahern
We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!
George Bernard Shaw
What a fine fellow is Quincey! I believe in my heart of hearts that he suffered as much about Lucy’s death as any of us, but he bore himself through it like a moral Viking. If America can go on breeding men like that, she will be a power in the world indeed.
Bram Stoker
Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
Joseph O'Neill
The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.
John Connolly
To gain that which is worth having,it may be necessary to lose everything else.
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
Ah, yeah. Yeah, tis awful all right. Well, your Mam wanted me to talk to you about it, but…’He stopped; he didn’t know what else to say.‘Yeah? Ah, I know the score, Dad. She wants me to be careful, is it?’‘Ah, no. Well, yeah; there’s that, of course. No, she wanted… well, if you’d any questions, youknow?’ I wasn’t sure if he wanted me to say yes, or if he just wanted me to say no, and save himhaving to be awkward. He looked lost. I felt like I wanted to save him‘No, I’ve no questions, Dad. It’s all right, shur.’ He looked at me then. His eyes went wet, likehe was going to start bawling. If we were in a film, he might have hugged me. But we were inLimerick, so he just said:‘Well, so,’ and put his one glove back on.From The Boys of Summer
Ciarán West
Imagine you had a friend who was there for you all the time and you were there for them, but they stopped being there for you as much as they used to which you can understand a little because people have things to do, but then they’re around less and less no matter how much you try to reach out to them. Then suddenly one day - nothing - they’re gone. Just like that. Then you write to them, and you’re ignored, and then you write to them again and you’re ignored and finally you write to them for a third time and they barely even want to make the appointment, they’re so busy with their job, their friends and their car. How would you feel?
Cecelia Ahern
I generally don’t become overexcited about things anyway, I’m just not one of those people.I’m not easily surprised by things either. I think it’s because I expect that anything can happen. That makes me sound like a believer and I’m not necessarily that either. I’ll phrase it better: I just accept things that happen. All things.
Cecelia Ahern
Nemo intrat in caelum nisi per philosophiam
Johannes Scotus Eriugena
Success is manufactured in the Mind, while Happiness is cultivated in the Soul
Philip McKernan
Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.
James Joyce
I loved him, you know,' she said. 'I would have loved him as hard as he'd let me, for the rest of my life.
Tana French
They drink from streams whose waters taste like tears, and indeed each swallow fills them with a few heartbeats of deep sadness.
Peadar Ó Guilín
Maybe love is thinking that every time your partner does or says something mundane that you want to start a Mexican wave from here to Uzbekistan in utter delight.
Cecelia Ahern
[Letter to William Ward, 11 July 1878]Dear Boy, Why don’t you write to me? I don’t know what has become of you.As for me I am ruined. The law suit is going against me and I am afraid I will have to pay costs, which means leaving Oxford and doing some horrid work to earn bread. The world is too much for me.However, I have seen Greece and had some golden days of youth. I go back to Oxford immediately for viva voce and then think of rowing up the river to town with Frank Miles. Will you come? YoursOscar
Oscar Wilde
He'd solved the problem you see—and that's the way some people are. They are ceaselessly finding ways of getting to grips with the world, of surmounting certain antipathies so as to apply themselves to it that little bit more. It's quite admirable really, how they refuse to let anything come between them and the rest of it—Oh, the rest of it! Sort of there, sort of hovering there all the time. Different ideas come to me now and again—strategies I suppose that might inculcate a little more compatibility. I just don't know if I'll ever get the hang of it if you want to know—as a matter of fact I think I've left it a little too late to cultivate the necessary outlook.
Claire-Louise Bennett
A world without pain, loss, betrayal, hate, death, loneliness? Impossible!
Darren Shan
It is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be.
Bram Stoker
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,For I would ride with you upon the wind,Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
W.B. Yeats
We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
Oscar Wilde
Desire for power is a kind of greed indulged by the unfulfilled
Michael Foley
From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul brain and power.
Oscar Wilde
Sometimes it's like: If something terrifies you, you should totally do it BECAUSE it terrifies you. And then you'll do it and you'll realise what you're capable of.
Jonathan Saccone-Joly
We have the power to bend all men to our whim, but are forever pushing ourselves further, trying to fly higher… and falling.
Darren Shan
Seeing his daughter slowly die, coupled with his infinite sadness and misery, the clockmaker becomes a recluse to the tower of the castle and begins to build something behind closed doors, not even his daughter knows what he’s up to. For five years, she only sees him briefly at meal-times before locking himself up in the tower once again...""...Did he have a bathroom in the tower?""Yes, Jack. A big one! En-suite! Power-shower and spa! Where was I!?
Jonathan Dunne
Maybe niceness is the wrong metric, I said. Of course it's really about power, Bobbi agreed. But it's harder to work out who has the power, so instead we rely on 'niceness' as a kind of stand-in. I mean this is an issue in public discourse. We end up asking like, is Israel 'nicer' than Palestine.
Sally Rooney
Well, what do they all amount to, these kings and captains and bishops and lawyers and such like? They just leave you in the ditch to bleed to death; and the next thing is, you meet them down there, for all the airs they give themselves.
George Bernard Shaw
Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.
Oscar Wilde
Life is more fragile and precious than I can comprehend, but believe me, I'm trying.
John O'Callaghan
The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic but by slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation.
John Tyndall
Our view of the mind not only shapes our view of ourselves; less obviously, it also shapes our view of that part of our experience we conceive of as dealing with the external world. As we learn about the structure of this aspect of experience, we find that the world presents itself to consciousness only after being mediated to lesser or (more often) greater extents by mental structures and processes.
Sean O Nuallain
He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage.
James Joyce
He laughed to free his mind from his minds bondage.
James Joyce
There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and the whereabouts of these exhalations... So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.
Iris Murdoch
If you can't change your mind, you can't change anything.
Orna Ross
Stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.
Frank McCourt
Unfathomable mind: now beacon, now sea.
Samuel Beckett
Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.
James Joyce
She hesitated, wiping her hands off on her apron. “I’m not sure if I’ll be here when you get back. This place is a little—it’s a little much for me.”She didn’t have to tell him how it was. He had lived here for years, in a house that wanted to be silent until the silence was broken by a certain step and a certain voice, in a house holding its breath for someone’s return. If anyone held their breath long enough, they were dead.
Sarah Rees Brennan