Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 52

Children's voices - even those who couldn't carry the tune - are always appealing.
Anne McCaffrey
I made the valuable discovery that practicing wasn't a matter of time at all. It was a matter of intensity. Five minutes spent working consciously and hard at the elimination of an error, was worth five hours just playing away ignoring errors as if they hadn't happened.
Leonard Wibberley
What you don’t have you don’t need it now. 
What you don’t know you can feel it somehow
. What you don’t have you don’t need it now
, don’t need it now
It was a beautiful day
U2
The bravest thing David Bowie ever did was to go on stage after Queen at Live Aid.
Stewart Stafford
There'll be no more music, Father. But there'll be this!" He stepped into the dark, picked up the knife, and held it under their noses. "Go home. Tell your people what you saw and heard here tonight. And tell 'em that anyone we catch on these roads after dark anymore... this is what they'll get. Now that I know we're never to see the face o' God, we have nothing to lose. So, make sure you have your message right, Father, 'cause there'll be no other warning.
Eddie Lenihan
Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.
Oscar Wilde
A translation is no translation,’ he said, ‘unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.
John Millington Synge
You can't live life being second best.
Alex Trimble performed by Two Door Cinema Club
One Life, with each other, Sisters, Brothers...
Bono
tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play— I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.
Oscar Wilde
Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?
George Bernard Shaw
Cold,cold water,surrounds me now,and all I've got is your hand.
Damien Rice
A picture is just a picture, but add music and there's emotion. There's a story.
L.H. Cosway
Hell is full of musical amateurs.
George Bernard Shaw
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.
Oscar Wilde
If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
Oscar Wilde
Music can change the world because it can change people.
Bono
Pop music often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it's not OK, but you can change it.
Bono
THAT crazed girl improvising her music.Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,Her soul in division from itselfClimbing, falling She knew not where,Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declareA beautiful lofty thing, or a thingHeroically lost, heroically found.No matter what disaster occurredShe stood in desperate music wound,Wound, wound, and she made in her triumphWhere the bales and the baskets layNo common intelligible soundBut sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea
W.B. Yeats
Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
Oscar Wilde
Willpower is misunderstood. The very word suggests that wanting something badly enough bequeaths that necessary strength to achieve or overcome something. If that were the case, I'd be Michael Fassbender's missus by now.
Annmarie O'Connor
You know the old adage: give a woman a bag and she'll fill it for a day. Teach a woman to pack and she'll fill every damn bag she owns (or something of that ilk).
Annmarie O'Connor
Excuses – the great enabler. Without them, we'd have no reason to shop when we shouldn't and every reason to feel guilty for doing so. Nothing like the aul 'dog ate my knickers' chestnut to manifest a new handbag at will (in which to deposit much-needed new knickers, of course).
Annmarie O'Connor
I was sweating like Christy Moore at a Feis Ceol, so badly, in fact, I looked like I was sporting a finger moustache as I attempted to rescue suicidal perspiration drops from my upper lip. Classy.
Annmarie O'Connor
It started with feelings of jealousy and like a mental virus it spread.
Dermot Davis
It is he who has broken the bond of marriage - not I. I only break its bondage.
Oscar Wilde
If you want to know, it was the capitalists who invented marriage in order to protect the laws of inheritance.
James Plunkett
Ariadne made an impression on you, and that's great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you're left watching somebody's body disintegrate. You start with a love story, you end up manacled to an hourglass, watching the sands run out.
Paul Murray
Some of the 'New Women' writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won't condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too!
Bram Stoker
When, some months later, Zoltan emailed me about his decision to run for president, I immediately called him. The first thing I asked was what his wife thought of the plan.“Well, in a way,” he said, “it was Lisa who gave me the idea. Remember how I said she wanted me to do something concrete, get some kind of a proper job?”“I do,” I said. “Although I’m guessing running for president on the immortality platform was not what she had in mind.”“That’s correct,” he confirmed. “It took a little while for her to come around to the idea.”“How did you break it to her?”“I left a note on the refrigerator,” he said, “and went out for a couple hours.
Mark O'Connell
Lady Windermere: Windermere and I married for love.Duchess of Berwick: Yes, we begin like that. It was only Berwick's brutal and incessant threats of suicide that made me accept him at all, and before the year was out, he was running after all kinds of petticoats, every colour, every shape, every material.
Oscar Wilde
(...) and I tell you, Austin Ruthyn, if you won't look about and marry somebody, somebody may possibly marry you.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worse habits.
Oscar Wilde
Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information.I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that?I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.
Oscar Wilde
My mother insured that a life of petty facts and dutiful farming was kept at bay by her passionate intensity, which nurtured the essential dreaminess of his nature
Josephine Hart
Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.
Elizabeth Bowen
JACKThat is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won't want to know Bunbury.ALGERNONThen your wife will. You don't seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none.JACKThat, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years.ALGERNONYes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time.
Oscar Wilde
Marriage is very important. Marrying a girl is the most important thing a man can do. Never mind business or politics or sport or any of that, there's nothing so vital to the world as a man marrying a woman. That's where we get our children from, that's how the human race goes forward. And if it's too late for children, there's the companionship of a safe and trusted person.
Frank Delaney
Marriage is the gold standard of all relationships. It's the currency by which everything is valued.
Frank Delaney
Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?
George Bernard Shaw
You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about...anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all.
Oscar Wilde
Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
Oscar Wilde
Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.
George Bernard Shaw
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
Oscar Wilde
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
Oscar Wilde
Sometimes I wish I could feel more painso I could touch that much more beauty.
Edward Fahey
I guess no one can be painted with just one brush. There is light and shade in all of us, pain and hardship, and some of us rise from it while others are darkened by it.
Catherine Doyle
A lily-girl, not made for this world’s pain.
Oscar Wilde
At times I was desperate and could find no solace anywhere. Nothing seemed to work, and the weight of being trapped in my own body made it difficult to lift even a hand off the sheets.
Lucy Grealy
When one encounters enough strangeness, then what is strange ultimately becomes familiar.The mind can accommodate itself to almost anything, given time: pain, grief, loss, even the possibility that the dead talk to the living.
John Connolly
I don't like remembering the way that hurt her. Hurts her. I'm sure it still does; I'm just not around to see, and I don't like dwelling on that, either. That's only normal. Missing people you still love, and not wanting to see them in pain and angry and humiliated.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel.
William Trevor
Pain's nothing. Pains what you give, not what you get.
Colum McCann
But even them, my pains, I understand ill. That must come from my not being all pain and nothing else. There's the rub. Then they recede, or I, till they fill me with amaze and wonder, seen from a better planet. Not often, but I ask no more. Catch-cony life! To be nothing but pain, how that would simplify matters! Omnidolent! Impious dream.
Samuel Beckett
If you lose someone, you feel a loss, then after a while you fill in the hole in your life and the loss gradually gets smaller and smaller and eventually goes away. There's a point to the pain. There's a reason and a direction.
Marian Keyes
(Streets of Sorrow)Oh, farewell you streets of sorrowOh, farewell you streets of painI'll not return to feel more sorrowThrough the years I've lived through terrorAnd in the darkened streets, the painOh, how I long to find some solaceIn my mind, I curse the strainSo, farewell, you streets of sorrowAnd, farewell, you streets of pain
The Pogues
This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it--my face as personal vanishing point.
Lucy Grealy
Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth.
Emma Donoghue
It is good to be taught humility when we are young. If we do not exeperience pain as children, we will cause pain as adults.
Darren Shan
Every pain is a lesson.
Frank Delaney