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Quotes by Irish Authors
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
"Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer. They control the most simple Proustian episode, and an understanding of their mechanism must precede any particular analysis of their application."
"You are perfectly right in making some slight alteration. Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating."
"No one's ever really ready for a troll."
"After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears."
"The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."
"To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote 'King Lear."
"Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound."
"It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things."
"Don't wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto."
"You can't plough a field by turning it over in your mind. Either you get out there and plough it or it doesn't get done."
"I will look the part. I will act the part. I will deliver that which I have promised to deliver."
"The salesperson you'd ideally like to be and the salesperson you'd like to encounter as a customer should roughly be the same, shouldn't they?"
"To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was."
"But even them, my pains, I understand ill. That must come from my not being all pain and nothing else. There's the rub. Then they recede, or I, till they fill me with amaze and wonder, seen from a better planet. Not often, but I ask no more. Catch-cony life! To be nothing but pain, how that would simplify matters! Omnidolent! Impious dream."
"It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
"A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes."
"Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement."
"Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist."
"The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else."
"A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave."
"I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner."
"The world loves the Saint, and Christ loves the sinner."
"Parentage is a very important profession but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interests of the Children."
"The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty."
"When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can."
"An excellent man he has no enemies and none of his friends like him."
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