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Quotes by Irish Authors
"I believe that there may be intelligent life on other planets."
"No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious."
"The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time."
"The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed."
"Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die."
"Look at what you've done,' Sanguine said, shaking his head with mock severity. 'You have foiled out insidious little plot. You have emerged triumphant and victorious. Curse you, do-gooders. Curse you."
"Only disaster can follow divided counsels and opposing wills."
"Study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance."
"Pity and friendship are two passions incompatible with each other."
"There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all."
"In terms of language, yeah we get bleeped and blurred and things, but in terms of content, I would probably say we're getting away with more here than we could get away with in Britain. And that surprised us so much!"
"My Father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic."
"Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions."
"He crouched at the car window and looked in. 'What a lovely family you have. What a charming family. They're all lovely. Except for that one.' His finger jabbed the glass. 'That one's a bit ugly."
"Large increases in cost with questionable increases in performance can be tolerated only in race horses and women."
"Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as if it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own."
"There comes a moment on a journey when something sweet, something irresistible and charming as wine raised to thirsty lips, wells up in the traveller's being."
"I've always worked on the machines, especially the 125 and 250 which are really difficult to set up."
"A mutual arrangement, I repeat, is the only satisfactory medium whereby the present system can be carried on with any degree of satisfaction, and in such an arrangement the employers have more to gain than the workers."
"The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time."
"I will design my reputation and my resolve shall be absolute. I shall not give in when I know I can help."
"She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech."
"I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas into these articles. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous, subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blashphemous, and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and any one who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages."
"A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century."
"I wish you would tell me your secret. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable."
"I wrote when I did not know life;now that I know life, I have no more to say."
"But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering - curious as it may sound to you - is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity."
"The Engineer smiled (internally, for of course it had no mouth). It was feeling good. It was feeling optimistic. Moving at its current speed, it would arrive back in Ireland in plenty of time to shut everything down before a series of overloads and power loops inevitably led to a sequence of events which would, in turn, eventually lead to the probable destruction of the world. The Engineer wasn't worried.And then the truck hit it."
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