Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 59

The Sunlight on the GardenThe sunlight on the gardenHardens and grows cold,We cannot cage the minuteWithin its nets of gold,When all is toldWe cannot beg for pardon.Our freedom as free lancesAdvances towards its end;The earth compels, upon itSonnets and birds descend;And soon, my friend,We shall have no time for dances.The sky was good for flyingDefying the church bellsAnd every evil ironSiren and what it tells:The earth compels,We are dying, Egypt, dyingAnd not expecting pardon,Hardened in heart anew,But glad to have sat underThunder and rain with you,And grateful tooFor sunlight on the garden.
Louis MacNeice
Man is complete in himself. When they go into the world, the world will disagree with them. That is inevitable. The world hates Individualism. But that is not to trouble them. They are to be calm and self-centred. If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of no importance. If people abuse them, they are not to answer back. What does it signify? The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.
Oscar Wilde
Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.
Edmund Burke
He wants to enslave you.''I shudder at the thought of being free.
Oscar Wilde
Love and freedom are such hideous words. So many cruelties have been done in their name.
Joseph O'Connor
Peace means nothing without freedom.
Derek Landy
The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realize through that sin his true perfection.
Oscar Wilde
It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Edmund Burke
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
John Philpot Curran
In dreams begin responsibilities
W.B. Yeats
Ah, sleep, clothe me in thy velvet cloak.
Stewart Stafford
A man or a woman can inspire such deep fantasy and emotion that through the lovemaking embrace of a partners body we make break through the limits of the human condition to touch upon another level of reality.
Thomas Moore
With my arms wrapped around Rosebud, I dreamed of heather-topped hills and sleepy valleys and a pretty woodland stream where dragonflies danced across the water as I sat down among the ferns and the meadowsweet, waiting for the summer to find me.
Hazel Gaynor
I moved silently across the garden, silvered with moonlight, my feet barely touching the ground. I brushed past fern and tree, following the lights across the stream, toward the cottage in the clearing where I watched a little girl surrounded by light and laughter as the fairies threaded flowers through her hair. I stood out of sight, peering through the tangled blackberry bushes, but the girl saw me, rushing forward, her hand outstretched, a white flower clasped between her fingers. "For Mammy," she said. "For my Mammy.
Hazel Gaynor
With the rumble of the waterfall in the distance, I slipped into sleep and dreamed of a red-haired girl holding a posy of white flowers. The words of Mr. Noyes's poem crept from the pages of my picture book and tiptoed into my mind. "Then you blow your magic vial, / Shape it like a crescent moon, / Set it up and make your trial, / Singing, 'Fairies, ah, come soon!
Hazel Gaynor
Mercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.
Iris Murdoch
When I am at my work each dayIn the fields so fresh and greenI often think of riches and the way things might have beenBut believe me when I tell you when I get home each dayI'm as happy as a sandboy with my wee cup of tay
Patrick McCabe
What dreams would he have, not seeing. Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born that way?
James Joyce
People forget they have options. And they forget that those things don't really matter. They should concentrate on what they have and not what they don't have. And by the way, wishing and dreaming doesn't mean concentrating on what you don't have, it's positive thinking that encourages hoping and believing, not whinging and moaning.
Cecelia Ahern
I dream dark dreams. I dream of a figure moving through the forest, of children flying from his path, of young women crying at his coming. I dream of snow and ice, of bare branches and moon-cast shadows. I dream of dancers floating in the air, stepping lightly even in death, and my own pain is but a faint echo of their suffering as I run. My blood is black on the snow, and the edges of the world are silvered with moonlight. I run into the darkness, and he is waiting. I dream in black and white, and I dream of him. I dream of Caleb, who does not exist, and I am afraid.
John Connolly
Then I perceived, what I had never thought, that all these staring houses were not alike, but different one from another, because they held different dreams.
Lord Dunsany
Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exists and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
That somehow dreams are a blurred line between here and there, like a meeting room in a prison. You’re both in the same room, yet on different sides and really, in different worlds.
Cecelia Ahern
My nightly craft is winged in white, a dragon of night dark sea.Swift born, dream bound and rudderless, her captain and crew are me.We've sailed a hundred sleeping tides where no seaman's ever beenAnd only my white-winged craft and I know the wonders we have seen.
Anne McCaffrey
One loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.
W.B. Yeats
The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
Oscar Wilde
In dreams begin responsibilities.
W.B. Yeats
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;I have spread my dreams under your feet;Tread softly because you tread on my dr
W.B. Yeats
Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Oscar Wilde
He asked me, "what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another?" I answered "they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in a war, in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire: what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or gray: and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, especially if it be in things indifferent.
Jonathan Swift
It gives the war a whole new dimension, you know, hearing from someone right there in the thick of it. They really connected with it.’‘Maybe it reminds them of school,’ she suggests. ‘Didn’t someone describe the trenches as ninety-nine per cent boredom and one per cent terror?’‘I don’t know about boredom. God, the chaos of it, the brutality. And it’s so vivid. I’d definitely be interested in reading his poetry, if only to see how he can go from describing, you know, people getting their guts blown out, to writing about love.’‘Maybe it’s not that much of a leap,’ she says.
Paul Murray
He was shivering like a Wicklow sheepdog in a snowy yard, though the weather was officially 'clement'.The first layer of clothing was his jacket, the second his shirt, the third his long-johns, the fourth his share of lice, the fifth his share of fear.
Sebastian Barry
What do they be teaching the young these days? I declare, they think more on machines and formulas than they do on the true knowledge of the world. They blow things up, and call it progress. They kills one another by the million, and calls it civilization... But you takes a single life, just one, and that is murder most foul, and they will pin you for that, and lay it against you the rest of your life. It hardly seems fair.
Paul Kearney
You think one's any different from the next? I mean, when it comes right down to brass tacks, people killing each other since they figured out how, that's all. Give them pretty names and numbers, but it's all the same to the worms.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
It's worse for you. You want the guilt to absolve you. Just like you want your wife and child to absolve you. Once absolved, you can kill or take soup.
Audrey Magee
Will you stay in Germany?''No. Somewhere different.''Like where?''Somewhere there was no war. Ireland maybe.
Audrey Magee
Because I am an officer and a gentleman they have given me my notebooks, pen, ink and paper. So I write and wait. I am committed to no cause, I love no living person. The fact that I have no future except what you can count in hours doesn't seem to disturb me unduly. After all, the future whether here or there is equally unknown. So for the waiting days I have only the past to play about with. I can juggle with a series of possibly inaccurate memories, my own interpretation, for what is worth, of events. There is no place for speculation or hope, or even dreams. Strangely enough I think I like it like that.
Jennifer Johnston
You can’t demand peace, but you can reduce the reasons for war.
Colin R. Turner
My friends I tell you this, we are a jolly group but put us in uniform and all that change. In war I don’t know who my brother. In war I don’t know who my friend. War make everybody savage. Who can say what lies inside the heart of each one of us when everything is taken away.
Edna O'Brien
All is changed, changed utterlyA terrible beauty is born
W.B. Yeats
Trench dirt didn't always wash out, I am sure.
Sebastian Barry
All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife's response that came - as if in compensation for too little said before - when he wondered why his wandering had led him back to these old battlefields: in his sixty-ninth year he was establishing his survivor's status.
William Trevor
Four men killed that day. The phrase sat up in Willie's head like a rat and made a nest for itself there
Sebastian Barry
It (politician) wants to separate them. And to do so it has chosen the worst, blackest pencil of all - the pencil of war, which spells only misery and death.
Zlata Filipović
I cannot have chaos erupting around me until I am prepared for it. I am a collector. I am an observer. I don't participate. My resources, and my standing, must be secure before I can allow the uncertainty of war to crash down upon us.
Derek Landy
They ex­pect­ed to lose. And there­fore, they lost. [..] Peo­ple who start think­ing deep dark thoughts in the mid­dle of a war start ex­pect­ing to lose.
Michael Scott
In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.
Oscar Wilde
Let my country die for me.
James Joyce
It would be unfair to expect other people to be as brilliant as oneself.
Oscar Wilde
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating- people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde
No matter how far I try to travel from people, people always appear. Either they follow me, or they're already there, and I followed them, unwittingly.
Sara Baume
You take a straight tip from the stable, Cokey, if you must hate, hate the government or the people or the sea or men, but don't hate an individual person. Who's done you a real injury. Next thing you know he'll be getting into your beer like prussic acid; and blotting out your eyes like a cataract and screaming in your ears like a brain tumour and boiling round your heart like melted lead and ramping though your guts like a cancer. And a nice fool you'd look if he knew. It would make him laugh till his teeth dropped out; from old age.
Joyce Cary
The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea.
Sebastian Barry
People move around so much in the world, things get lost.
Emma Donoghue
What is certain is this, that I never rested in that way again, my feet obscenely resting on the earth, my arms on the handlebars and on my arms my head, rocking and abandoned. It is indeed a delporable sight, a deplorable example, for the people, who so need to be encouraged, in their bitter toil, and to have before their eyes manifestations of strength only, of courage and joy, without which they might collapse, at the end of the day, and roll on the ground.
Samuel Beckett
People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.
William Trevor
We don't love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them
Laurence Sterne
Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.
Oscar Wilde
People come and go.
Cecelia Ahern
People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.
Colum McCann