top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Irish Authors
"Unfathomable mind: now beacon, now sea."
"Arles is certainly one of the most interesting towns I have ever seen, whether viewed as a place remarkable for the objects of antiquity it contains, or for the primitive manners of its inhabitants and its picturesque appearance."
"Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought."
"I had no accomplishments except surviving. But that isn't enough in the community where I came from, because everybody was doing it. So I wasn't prepared for America, where everybody is glowing with good teeth and good clothes and food."
"No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base."
"Acting is invigorating. But I don't analyse it too much. It's like a dog smelling where it's going to do its toilet in the morning."
"It took teams of LEP warlocks to slow down time for a few hours, the magic required to open a door to the tunnel was stupendous. It would be easier to shoot down the moon.Opal tapped this into her notepad.Reminder. Shoot down the moon? Viable?"
"I can't go too much into my domestic life because there are ex-wives ready to do me in."
"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating."
"We all get lost once in a while, sometimes by choice, sometimes due to forces beyond our control. When we learn what it is our soul needs to learn, the path presents itself. Sometimes we see the way out but wander further and deeper despite ourselves; the fear, the anger or the sadness preventing us returning. Sometimes we prefer to be lost and wandering, sometimes it's easier. Sometimes we find our own way out. But regardless, always, we are found."
"The important thing is not what we (look) like,but the role we play in our best friend's life."
"We are beaten, we will make no bones about it; but we are not too badly beaten still to fight."
"Hope like that, as I thought before, doesn't make you a weak person. It's hopelessness that makes you weak. Hope makes you stronger, because it brings with it a sense of reason. Not a reason for how or why they were taken from you, but a reason for you to live. Because it's a maybe. A 'maybe someday things won't always be this shit.' And that 'maybe' immediately makes the shittiness better."
"Sinn Fein is the fastest growing party on the island of Ireland."
"I enjoy all aspects of it, I don't have a preference for any medium. I think each of them has its attractions and I would hope they each inform the other in some way."
"Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you."
"Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky."
"I was a failed actor but I still wanted to show off, so I ended up doing live comedy."
"I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books--whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives."
"Certainly, I think being depressed is absolutely part of the human condition, it has to be, if there's joy there's its opposite, and it's something you ride if you possibly can."
"And say my glory was I had such friends."
"There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life."
"The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail, and to be seen to fail."
"Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves."
"You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing. You lost life's secret."
"I have to report to those of you who think diamonds make a difference that I cannot tell what it is. Seriously, as you all know, they make no difference at all. They just make the flute look a little more special."
"I do not believe that the Social Security system is in crisis."
"Dying for dark - the darker the worse. Strange."
"The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency."
"James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can."
"The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development."
"If we don't take Tullamore, no other community will."
"Irish people are educated not only about artistry but local history."
"A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out."
"A remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good in spite of all the people who say he is very good."
"How could you have had such a wonderful life as me if there wasn't a God directing?"
bottom of page