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Quotes by Irish Authors
"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."
"The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language."
"What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do."
"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine."
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."
"The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea."
"Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?"
"The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failure."
"Wisdom denotes the pursuing of the best ends by the best means."
"Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative."
"I don't even know what the odds are for one kid or one team to make it here. Obviously, being from Canada this is their Stanley Cup - they made it. It's hard enough to get here and it's hard enough to advance."
"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. The people who get on in this world are they who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them make them."
"A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere - no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift to articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton..."
"Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one's prejudices."
"The only horrible thing in the world is ennui."
"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads."
"Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose."
"All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead."
"A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent."
"Talking about one's feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and a name. Every random thought must have a root in something else."
"In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?"
"Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information.I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that?I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person."
"Everybody sells something to somebody every day, whether it's a product, a service or just a case of making sure that they get their own way."
"Every bond is a bond to sorrow."
"Anybody can make history, only a great man can write it."
"The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation."
"Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are."
"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one."
"In this wonderful modern age, if you know what you want, you can just reach out and, with the click of a mouse, take complete control of your entire buying and shopping experience."
"Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things."
"The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office."
"But I can understand now why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this."
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