Irish Author Quotes

Oscar Wilde

George Bernard Shaw

James Joyce

Samuel Beckett

William Butler Yeats

Jonathan Swift

Bram Stoker

Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow.

Those whom we called brutes had their revenge when Darwin showed us that they were our cousins.

George Bernard Shaw

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

I am naturally taciturn, and became a silent and attentive listener.

William Hamilton Maxwell

Didn't I seize the fire of ideas and make them leap, tear, fly, sing

I learn several great truths; as that it is impossible to see into the ways of futurity, that punishment always attends the villain, that love is the fond soother of the human breast.

Oliver Goldsmith

What's lost upon the roundabouts we pulls up on the swings!

Patrick R. Chalmers

Not she with trait'rous kiss her Saviour stung, Not she denied him with unholy tongue; She, while apostles shrank, could danger brave, Last at his cross and earliest at his grave.

Eaton Stannard Barrett

It has been explained to me that toys are packaged in shards, to be assembled by the middle-aged and butter-fingered, because this makes it easier for the shippers.... If they had to spend hours and hours putting handlebars onto bicycles... they would repent their ways and deliver something that looked like a rocking horse and not like the result of a small street accident.

I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible.

A place in thy memory, dearest,
Is all that I claim;
To pause and look back when thou hearest
The sound of my name.

There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest.

For the future I cease, Death approaches with little delay,
Since the dragons of Laune and Lane and Lee are destroyed;
I'll follow the heroes far from the light of day,
The princes my ancestors followed before Christ died.

I tell you, in the first instance, that Ireland is an enslaved country. A great mistake is entertained by many persons to the effect that there cannot be slavery—that no man can be a slave unless he be in chains, or subject to the lash of the planter like the negroes; but the slavery of which I speak is the slavery of the people, which consists in this, that they do not make their own laws themselves—that they do not make the laws by which they are governed, but that those laws are made by others, and I say it boldly, that a people so circumstanced are in a state of slavery.

The most important thing I would learn in school was that almost everything I would learn in school would be utterly useless. When I was fifteen I knew the principal industries of the Ruhr Valley, the underlying causes of World War One and what Peig Sayers had for her dinner every day...What I wanted to know when I was fifteen was the best way to chat up girls. That is what I still want to know.

Joseph O'Connor

Experience has taught me that what you love, you should love all the harder because someday it will be gone.

There was a most ingenious architect who had contrived a new method for building houses, by beginning at the roof, and working downward to the foundation.

Aged 15 or 16, I found some of the priests sexually attractive, they had a way about them... a sexual allure which is a difficult thing to talk about because it's usually meant to be the opposite way round. Boys like me, aged 15 — if one of them had... yeah, it would have been absolutely no problem for me aged 15. It didn't happen, but it wouldn't have been a problem.

When I had curls
I knew more girls.
I do more reading
Now my hair is receding.

James Simmons (poet)

The ordinariness of people is what is often extraordinary.

Ah! my heart is weary waiting,
Waiting for the May:
Waiting for the pleasant rambles
Where the fragrant hawthorn brambles,
Where the woodbine alternating,
Scent the dewy way;
Ah! my heart is weary, waiting,
Waiting for the May.

Denis Florence MacCarthy

History, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn't make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn't fit. And often that is quite a lot.

Paul Murray (author)

No one knows what is in him till he tries, and many would never try if they were not forced to.

Basil W. Maturin

One way of looking at poetic periods is to notice what contemporary interests and knowledge penetrate the best verse written at the time and what moods are permitted in treating of these matters.

Come, let us make love deathless, thou and I,
Seeing that our footing on the Earth is brief-
Seeing that her multitudes sweep out to die
Mocking at all that passes their belief.