Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 53

Don't make it worse by thinking it's more painful than it actually is.
John Boyne
Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.
Bono
The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.
Oscar Wilde
Heaven on Earth, we need it nowI'm sick of all of this hanging aroundSick of sorrow, sick of the painI'm sick of hearing again and againThat there's gonna be peace on Earth......Tell the ones who hear no soundWhose sons are living in the groundPeace on EarthNo whos or whysNo one cries like a mother criesFor peace on Earth
U2
If people were more concerned with how they looked on the inside, then on the outside, the world would be a nicer place to exist.
David Walsh
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
George Bernard Shaw
A child in London asked her father what autumn was, having heard it spoken of these days, and the father in explanation said it was a season, though not a major one. In cities, this father said, you did not feel autumn so much, not as you felt the heat of summer or the bite of winter air, or even the slush of spring. He said that, and then the next day sent for the child and said he had been talking nonsense. 'Autumn is on now,' he said. 'You can see it in the parks,' and he took his child for a nature walk.
William Trevor
You are on your back at the foot of an aspen. In its trembling shade. She at right angles propped on her elbows head between her hands. Your eyes opened and closed have looked in hers looking in yours. In your dark you look in them again. Still. You feel on your face the fringe of her long black hair stirring in the still air. Within the tent of hair your faces are hidden from view. She murmurs, Listen to the leaves. Eyes in each other's eyes you listen to the leaves. In their trembling shade.
Samuel Beckett
In the summers we swam in the river and caught minnows with jam pots; on Sunday evenings my father fished in it, bringing home each time a bag of trout. In winter salmon came up to this quiet backwater to spawn and, of course, there was a certain amount of poaching, to which my father objected strongly. Once, when a generous neighbour gave us a present of a poached salmon, he lined us all up around the kitchen table and proceeded to open up the fish. As the eggs poured out he explained about the huge loss of fish life due to the poaching of this one salmon. In my father's world nature possessed a balance and man had no right to upset that balance to satisfy his own greed; killing this fish was going against the laws of nature.
Alice Taylor
There's nothing man can imagine that nature hasn't already created a zillion times better.
Stewart Stafford
The month of May is the pleasant time; its face is beautiful; the blackbird sings his full song, the living wood is his holding, the cuckoos are singing and ever singing; there is a welcome before the brightness of the summer.
Lady Gregory
The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great.
Oscar Wilde
It was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and devoid of reason. Their senselessness had never so much impressed me.
Iris Murdoch
If it is true that nature abhors a vacuum, then criminality regards it as a business opportunity.
John Connolly
It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.
Oscar Wilde
Blending into the tinctures and textures of the countryside. The tree which falls without any human hearing still falls, as the creatures who die without being found by a human still die.
Sara Baume
I see foxes often, but always they are crossing fallow fields in the distance. Gold flecks on faraway expanses of green. Magnetic to the meandering eye. Enigmatic, unreachable.
Sara Baume
Daffy bent down suddenly, and picked a small startled white flower. "Anemone," he said, handing it over; he made her repeat the word until she had it right. "Find me a silk to match that.
Emma Donoghue
The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.
Edmund Burke
The crow flew closer, as if to hear its praises.
Emma Donoghue
And like any dog, like any savage, I lay there enjoying myself, harming no man, selling nothing, competing not at all, thinking no evil, smiled on by the sun, bent over by the trees, and softly folded in the arms of the earth.
John Stewart Collis
Life has always poppies in her hands.
Oscar Wilde
[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
George Bernard Shaw
It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon.
Oscar Wilde
Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
Oscar Wilde
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.
George Bernard Shaw
Throughout history--even a hundred years ago, even fifty--it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it's contentment,
Tana French
It is as though the human race is always only waiting for permission to hate.
Celine Kiernan
Man wasn't made to share the universe with gods.
Darren Shan
I was wrong to try and impose something of my humanity on you, when being human never did me any good
Sara Baume
There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one's humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before.
John Connolly
These robots are literally inhuman, and yet I react no differently to their stumblings and topplings than I would to the pratfalls of a fellow human. I don’t imagine I would laugh at the spectacle of a toaster falling out of an SUV, or a semiautomatic rifle pitching over sideways from an upright position, but there is something about these machines, their human form, with which it is possible to identify sufficiently to make their falling deeply, horribly funny.
Mark O'Connell
For even in the pit of darkness, the beacon of humanity can always shine through.
Stewart Stafford
It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.
Oscar Wilde
That is one of the great secrets of life Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.
Oscar Wilde
If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.
Jonathan Swift
Sometimes I want to be human for you.
Sarah Rees Brennan
Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated: they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only “frail.” They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative, only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all: liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls.
George Bernard Shaw
A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.
George Bernard Shaw
There were always historians who said [historical Jesus research] can not be done because of historical problems. There were always theologians who said it should not be done because of theological objections. And there were always scholars who said the former when they meant the latter.
John Dominic Crossan
It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.
John Dominic Crossan
[C]ontemporary Jesus research is still involved in textual looting, in attacks on the mound of Jesus tradition that do not begin from any overall stratigraphy, do not explain why this or that item was chosen for emphasis over some other one, and give the distinct impression that the researcher knew the result before beginning the search.
John Dominic Crossan
The past is recorded almost exclusively in the voices of elites and males, in the viewpoints of the wealthy and the powerful, in the visions of the literate and the educated.
John Dominic Crossan
And if I was bewildered through those decades, totally bewildered, so was the country I came from. The majority, what was the phrase? 'Condemn utterly what is happening, this barbarity.' But that's all we did. Condemn. And march. But not often enough.
Josephine Hart
When boys called Bob and Bono would bring their own wild-rhythm celebration and the world would fall down in worshipful hallelujahs as it again acknowledged Ireland's capacity to create missionaries. So what if they were "the boys in the band"? They sang from a pulpit, an enormous pulpit looking down on a congregation that would knock your eyes out. A city that had produced Joyce and Beckett and Yeats, a country that had produced poet-heroes and more priests and nuns per head of population than almost any on earth was not going to spawn boys who just wanted to stand before a packed hall of gyrating teenagers and strum their guitars and sing. They had to have a message. One of salvation; they were in it to save the world. Like I said, we're teachers, missionaries.
Josephine Hart
A child is never the author of his own history.
Sebastian Barry
Old, is it?" the man asks."Yes, very.""Pre-war, is it?""Yes," I say. "If by war you mean the Norman invasion.
Garrett Carr
Like, okay. Everyone in history thought they were the ones who finally knew everything. In their naissance, right, they were positive they knew exactly how the universe worked. Til the next set of guys came along and proved they were missing like a hundred important things. and then that set of guys were sure they had it all down, til another set came along and showed them parts they were missing." He glances at Julia, checking if she's laughing at him, which she isn't, and if she's listening, which she is, completely. "So." he says, "it's pretty unlikely, mathematically, that we are living in the one single era that has everything figured out. Which means there's a decent possibility that the reason we can't explain how ghosts and stuff could exist is because we haven't figured it out yet, not because they don't. And it is pretty arrogant of us to think it definitely has to be the other way around.
Tana French
I guess love laughs at history a little.
Sebastian Barry
The Noblest form of Affection
Oscar Wilde
The prevailing taste of the public for anecdote has been censured and ridiculed by critics, who aspire to the character of superior wisdom: but if we consider it in a proper point of view, this taste is an incontestible proof of the good sense and profoundly philosophic temper of the present times. Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labors!
Maria Edgeworth
The ages live in history through their anachronisms.
Oscar Wilde
To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.
Jack Lynch
There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word, DRACULA.
Bram Stoker
History, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot.
Paul Murray
The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
Colum McCann
People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.
Hugo Hamilton
Never say more than is necessary.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
Edmund Burke