Irish Author Quotes

Some of us made it
To the forest edge, but many of us did not
Make it, although their unborn children did—
Such as you whom the camp commandant branded
Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols. Jesus, break his fall:
There—but for the clutch of luck—go we all.

It is only the happy who are hard, Gilles. I think perhaps it is better for the world if - if one has a broken heart. One is quick to recognise it, elsewhere. And one has time to think about other people, if there is nothing left to hope for any more.

The country wears their going like a scar,
Today their relatives save to support and
Send others in planes for the new diaspora.

It won't be long before we'll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.

Joseph O'Neill (writer)

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.

There has been no lack of courage in Ireland; there never is, but even our courage has a fatal quality.

Susan L. Mitchell

I love the sweet linnet, the lark, and the thrush, And the gold-throated blackbird with a song in each bush ; The finch and the robin, I love everyone, But not the pied magpie that's walking alone.

Katharine Tynan

What is it our mammas bewitches
To plague us little boys with breeches?

Imagine how they stood there, what they stood with
that their possessions may become our power.
Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parcelled in them.

But every road is tough to me
That has no friend to cheer it.

Elizabeth Shane

The length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present.

Eileen Shanahan

I am travelling from one April to another.
It is the same train between the same embankments.
Gorse fires are smoking, but primroses burn
And celandines and white may and gorse flowers.

Michael Longley

An age being mathematical, these flowers Of linear stalks and spheroid blooms were prized.

When Spring came on with fresh delight
To cheer the soul, and charm the sight
While every easy breezes, softer rain
And warmer suns salute the plain

Meningitis. It was a word you had to bite on to say it. It had a fright and a hiss in it.

O, she walked unaware of her own increasing beauty
That was holding men's thoughts from market or plough,

Patrick MacDonogh

Heaven above is softer blue
Earth around is sweeter green;
Something lives in every hue
Christless eyes have never seen
Birds with gladder songs o'erflow
Flowers with deeper beauties shine. Since I know, as now I know, I am His, and He is mine.

George Wade Robinson

As I heard the sweet lark sing
In the clear air of the day.

Samuel Ferguson

Over the mountains,
And over the waves,
Over the fountains,
And under the graves;
Over the floods that are deepest,
Which do Neptune obey;
Over the rocks that are steepest,
Love will find out the way.

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.

The young don't know what age is, and the old forget what youth was.

Seumas MacManus

Who dreads to the dust returning?
Who shrinks from the sable shore,
Where the high and haughty yearning
Of the soul can sting no more?

Bartholomew Dowling

Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question marks.

Of all the stages in a woman's life, none is so dangerous as the period between her acknowledgment of a passion for a man, and the day set apart for her nuptials.

A wind-vane changeable huff-puff
Always is a woman.

Richard Stanihurst