Quotes by Irish Authors - Page 67

Places change imperceptibly – in detail, at least – a good deal,' said the Doctor, making an effort to keep up a conversation that plainly would not go on itself; 'and people too; population shifts – there's an old fellow, sir, they call Death.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
I found it idiotically distressing that a sharp finger whistle could no longer summon them outdoors into a playful twilight. An ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to make nothing less than a mortal action. The suspicion came to me for the fist time that they were figures of my dreaming, like the loved dead: my mother and all these vanished boys. And after Mama's cremation I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one's dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead.
Joseph O'Neill
Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.
William Trevor
Cad é an mhaith dom eagla a bheith orm? Ní shaorfadh eagla duine ón mbás, dar ndóigh.
Peig Sayers
I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.
Samuel Beckett
It came to Mary now that her mother had been right, after all; Mary had been born for this. In sixteen years she'd shot along the shortest route she could find between life and death, as the crow flew.
Emma Donoghue
Besides, the story is ambivalent and mysterious in its ending. Is this Alkestis returning from down below? Why does she have a veil over her face? Could it be that when we forcefully bring back to life what has been lost through love what we get is only a shate of its former reality? Maybe we can never succeed fully in restoring the soul to life. Maybe she will always be veiled and at least partially shielded from the rigors of actual life. Love demands a submission that is total.
Thomas Moore
He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.
John Banville
Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.
Colum McCann
I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.
Oscar Wilde
When we mourn those who die young – those who have been robbed of time – we weep for lost joys. We weep for opportunities and pleasure we ourselves have never known. We feel sure that somehow that young body would have known the yearning delight for which we searched in vain all our lives. We believe that the untried soul, trapped in its young prison, might have flown free and known the joy that we still seek.
Josephine Hart
You can’t avoid the inevitability of death. It comes at you one way or another, and takes us all to the same place in the end. To apologize for it is to apologize for the sun shining or the rain falling. It is what it is.
Catherine Doyle
I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.
Sebastian Barry
To learn to die is to learn to live. Death is the giver of life.
Michael Foley
You may remember that on earth—though of course we never confessed it—the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.
George Bernard Shaw
It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.
Oscar Wilde
Ah earth you old extinguisher.
Samuel Beckett
A man who takes into consideration the feelings of others even when arranging the manner of his own death shows a nobility of character which compels the admiration of all classes.
Flann O'Brien
To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.
Tana French
The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.
Sebastian Barry
You are afraid to die?'Yes, everyone is.'But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together. Girls are caterpillars when they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structures.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.
Tana French
We think of mortality so little these days...I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones.Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by,As you are now so once was I:As I am so will you be...
Tana French
Every once in a while, I get the urge. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? The urge for destruction. The urge to hurt, maim, kill. It’s quite a thing, to experience that urge, to let it wash over you, to give in to it. It’s addictive. It’s all-consuming. You lose yourself to it. It’s quite, quite wonderful. I can feel it, even as I speak, tapping around the edges of my mind, trying to prise me open, slip its fingers in. And it would be so easy to let it happen. But we’re all like that, aren’t we? We’re all barbarians at our core. We’re all savage, murderous beasts. I know I am. I’m sure you are. The only difference between us, Mr Prave, is how loudly we roar. I know I roar very loudly indeed. How about you? Do you think you can match me?
Derek Landy
Death is not a reaper, like they say, nor even a friend. It is a dark, fierce water, an inundation.
Siobhan Dowd
Life is a long agonized illness only curable by death.
Spike Milligan
If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body;--and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains,--then certes the soul does not inhabit there.
Laurence Sterne
I loved my mother too,' I said. 'I still do. That's the thing - it never goes away, even if the person does.
Anna Carey
(On his gravestone): "I told you I was ill".
Spike Milligan
My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.
Oscar Wilde
For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.
Oscar Wilde
We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
John Banville
Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
My life was going to flash before my eyes, but it decided to hide behind my eyes and quake with terror instead.
Sarah Rees Brennan
If anyone stops us, as long as we mumble something pretentious about the glory of death, we should be fine.
Derek Landy
Wait," said Butler. "Just wait, Holly. Artemis has a plan." He squinted through the green dome. "What is your plan, Artemis?"All Artemis could do was smile and shrug.
Eoin Colfer
Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.
Oscar Wilde
My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.
Tana French
Of course I want to kill you," said Skulduggery. "I want to kill most people. But then where would I be? In a field of dead people with no one to talk to.
Derek Landy
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
Samuel Beckett
The only sin is the sin of being born
Samuel Beckett
Believe me, when you die, it's everybody else's but your problem
Cecelia Ahern
Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.
Oscar Wilde
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
George Bernard Shaw
I'm not singing for the future I'm not dreaming of the past I'm not talking of the fist time I never think about the last
Shane MacGowan
So I care for this restless fluttering in my heart as if it were a bird with a broken wing, in the hope that it will one day heal and fly.
Hazel Gaynor
Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything.
Samuel Beckett
Hope is some extraordinary spiritual grace that God gives us to control our fears, not to oust them.
Vincent McNabb
Two lost things that had survived the seas and arrived on a coastline. What did they do? They implanted themselves in the sand and grew into trees and lined the beaches. Sometimes a lot can come of being all washed up. You can really grow.
Cecelia Ahern
In all my wanderings through this world of care,In all my griefs -- and God has given my share --I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown,Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down;To husband out life's taper at the close,And keep the flame from wasting, by repose:I still had hopes, for pride attends us still,Amidst the swains to show my book-learn'd skill,Around my fire an evening group to draw,And tell of all I felt, and all I saw;And, as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,Pants to the place from whence at first she flew,I still had hopes, my long vexations past,Here to return -- and die at home at last.
Oliver Goldsmith
Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.
Tana French
History says, Don’t hopeOn this side of the grave,But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed-for tidal waveOf justice can rise up,And hope and history rhyme
Seamus Heaney
I thought that the light-house looked lovely as hope,That star on life's tremulous ocean.
Thomas Moore
Your guardian angel never, ever stops communicating with you. I feel that at times they should be frustrated with us but they seem to have endless patience and they never ever give up on us.
Lorna Byrne
Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.
W.B. Yeats
When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.
Seán O'Casey
There are certain kinds of silence that make you walk on air.
Cecelia Ahern
If you do not love me I shall not be loved. If I do not love you I shall not love.
Samuel Beckett
When I am lonely for boys what I miss is their bodies. The smell of their skin, its saltiness. The rough whisper of stubble against my cheek. The strong firm hands, the way they rest on the curve of my back.
A.M. Harte
We had no one else to learn this from- none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success- so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming.
Tana French