top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Irish Authors
"I'd rather play in front of a full house than an empty crowd."
"The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable."
"Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself."
"Seen no matter how and said as seen. Dread of black. Of white. Of void. Let her vanish. And the rest. For good."
"I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself."
"The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh."
"But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head."
"Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather an other chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?"
"Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it."
"When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckettas told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett."
"Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy."
"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home."
"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals."
"Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."
"What dreams would he have, not seeing. Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born that way?"
"They say a story loses something with each telling."
"Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius."
"Memory, in widow's weeds, with naked feet stands on a tombstone."
"I never wanted anything new; from the age of ten, I was convinced that you couldn't replace what was lost. I insisted on things on having to be found."
"Finding happiness by delivering it."
"I've learned that to be courageous is to feel fear within, every step of the way. Courage does not take over, it fights and struggles through every word you say and every step you take. It's a battle or a dance as to whether to let it pervade. It takes courage to overcome, but it takes extreme fear to be courageous."
"But somehow, I feel sure that if I lived in the country for six months, I should become so unsophisticated that no one would take the slightest notice of me."
"The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realize through that sin his true perfection."
"Nobody can pretend to know what people want to read or hear or see. People rarely know it themselves, they only know it after the fact."
"All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it."
"If you sound like a contestant from The Apprentice or if the customer believes that they are being sold AT, you have already failed."
"We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible."
"Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals."
"The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude."
"I was so sure that I knew what they needed and what I wanted to sell them that I never stopped long enough to find out what it was they wanted to buy."
"When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn't want to be a failure so I did ten times more work."
"There was a magic about the sea. People were drawn to it. People wanted to love by it, swim in it, play in it, look at it. It was a living thing that as as unpredictable as a great stage actor: it could be calm and welcoming, opening its arms to embrace it's audience one moment, but then could explode with its stormy tempers, flinging people around, wanting them out, attacking coastlines, breaking down islands. It had a playful side too, as it enjoyed the crowd, tossed the children about, knocked lilos over, tipped over windsurfers, occasionally gave sailors helping hands; all done with a secret little chuckle."
"Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well."
"When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people."
"To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him."
"Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.Vice and virtue are the artist's materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feelings, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectators, and not life, that art really mirrors."
"But I can now understand 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 ok to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings, the book closes, and I'm plunged back into reality."
"Friendship...is not something you learn in school,but if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship you really haven't learned anything."
bottom of page