Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 54

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.
Oscar Wilde
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
The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.
Oscar Wilde
Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.
George Bernard Shaw
I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible.
Sally Rooney
The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.
Oscar Wilde
One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
George Bernard Shaw
The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.
Oscar Wilde
[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.
George Bernard Shaw
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
Oscar Wilde
You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.
Frank McCourt
Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.
Oscar Wilde
When you weep, Jesus weeps with you. And together you enter into the dance of tears. The dance of tears with Jesus is a precious intimacy He shares only with those who have known deep suffering. In the dance of tears, Jesus shares your pain. He carries your deep sorrows in His everlasting arms. And He ultimately turns your mourning into dancing. He revives and saves your crushed spirit. What a blessed comfort in our deepest darkness to know the One who shares the depth of every pain and loss, every joy and gladness. Jesus, He is the One.
Catherine Martin
Sometimes religion gets in the way of God.
Bono
Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.
Edna O'Brien
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 in to the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this.
Cecelia Ahern
As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
Oscar Wilde
I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.
W.B. Yeats
I think I might have something for you today," he says, reaches beneath the counter, and his hand comes back with a book, clothbound cover the color of antique ivory, title and author stamped in faded gold and art deco letters. Best Ghost Stories by Algernon Blackwood, and she lifts it carefully off the countertop, picks it up the way someone else might lift a diamond necklace or a sick kitten, and opens the book to the frontispiece and title page, black-and-white photo of the author in a dapper suit, sadkind eyes and his bow tie just a little crooked.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
I loved this place when I was a kid. I still love it, but when I was a kid I'd take the bus down here and spend all day long reading in this room.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
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're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this.
Cecelia Ahern
But I can now understand 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're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's ok to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings, the book closes, and I'm plunged back into reality.
Cecelia Ahern
But when I read, I am completely alone. I have privacy from her and from everyone.
Sarah Crossan
You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.
Oscar Wilde
Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'.
Iris Murdoch
Life is limited, but by writing, and reading, we can live in different worlds, get inside the skins and minds of other people, and, in this way, push out the boundaries of our own lifes.
Joan Lingard
There's this magical place,' he says with mock solemnity, 'called a library--I don't know if you've heard of it, but they have books, and also newspaper, and back issues of newspapers...
Moïra Fowley-Doyle
The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
Iris Murdoch
Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Edmund Burke
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
Oscar Wilde
We should all realize that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls
Frank Wynne
Art is the business of selling fetishes, sacred relics once touched by genius: what the forger offers the gullible buyer is not art, it is "authenticity
Frank Wynne
That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with events, but with the thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind...The best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamor of actual existence, though the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn. His sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, books written, and marble hewn into form.
Oscar Wilde
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium
Oscar Wilde
To become a work of art is the object of living.
Oscar Wilde
If something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land.
Oscar Wilde
The greatest events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow out in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us.
Oscar Wilde
Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself
Oscar Wilde
To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote ‘King Lear.
Oscar Wilde
The arts that have escaped [uniformity] best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.
Oscar Wilde
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
Iris Murdoch
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Oscar Wilde
An educated person's ideas of Art are drwan naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends.
Oscar Wilde
I can't remember the name of the piece, or the artist. Maybe it wasn't even an artwork. Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behavior is an act of performance.
Sara Baume
I love that an idea can be so powerful it doesn't matter whether I've seen the artwork for real or not.
Sara Baume
How I adored to draw as a child, a teen; all my life before I began to try and shape a career out of it.
Sara Baume
Now I wonder if each artwork is in fact utterly inaccessible to everybody but the person to whom it is secretly addressed?
Sara Baume
You can't dance to paintings. This is something Ben said, during one of our White Cube conversations, back when I was still wrong about him. He said it even though, at the time, he was desperately trying to be a painter. He said it because it was true and not because it was something either of us wanted to hear.
Sara Baume
Art, and sadness, which last forever.
Sara Baume
Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming about him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures.
Oscar Wilde
Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.
Iris Murdoch
I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.
Iris Murdoch
B-but, Mr Jimson, I w-want to be an artist.''Of course you do,' I said, 'everybody does once. But they get over it, thank God, like the measles and the chickenpox. Go home and go to bed and take some hot lemonade and put on three blankets and sweat it out.''But Mr J-Jimson, there must be artists.''Yes, and lunatics and lepers, but why go and live in an asylum before you're sent for? If you find life a bit dull at home,' I said, 'and want to amuse yourself, put a stick of dynamite in the kitchen fire, or shoot a policeman. Volunteer for a test pilot, or dive off Tower Bridge with five bob's worth of roman candles in each pocket. You'd get twice the fun at about one-tenth of the risk.
Joyce Cary