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Quotes by Irish Authors
"Look!' said Foaly, pointing with some urgency into the vast steel-gray gloom, 'Someone who cares!"
"As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places."
"I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning."
"The eyes, too, were reptilelike in glint and gaze. Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit by one tiny human point, the window of a shriveled soul, poignant and selfembittered."
"There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People."
"Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little."
"Men constantly miscalculate what they can do in a day, and grossly underestimate what can be achieved in a year."
"Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it."
"There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains."
"I have been like a mediocre concert pianist playing in front of a tone-deaf family, who applaud out of duty rather than for accomplishment."
"Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough."
"I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful."
"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read."
"To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes."
"I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it."
"His belief is so passionate that it fills him with the burning desire to share his fabulous news with anyone who will listen. He is concerned that it is us that might be missing out, not him. His faith in a single road to salvation and paradise is so intense, that it would be ungodly not to share the good news with all those who are not aware."
"She lives the poetry she cannot write."
"It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things."
"Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning."
"I would love to write a mystery - a romantic, funny mystery."
"But it is only since I have ceased to live that I think of these things and the other things. It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life, and that I judge it, as it is said that God will judge me, and with no less impertinence. To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don't torment me, but one sometimes forgets."
"Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing-a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces."
"I always pushed myself. Whenever I felt I needed to stop, I made myself run faster."
"Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force."
"The drawback of stealing a thing, is that one never knows how wonderful the thing that one steals is."
"Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don't there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little."
"The art of government is the organisation of idolatry."
"Society is indeed a contract ... it becomes a participant not only between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."
"That, as my cousin Nord would say, is where my improvised lie falls apart."
"A mug's game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so."
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