Ireland celebrate today St. Patrick, its most famous and international party, which spans the entire world, a world now secluded from an invisible enemy. So I join the celebration - and the requests that surely are being made to the saint to lend a hand - with a compilation of phrases of some of the most important writers irish. From classics like James Joyce, oscar Savage or George Bernard Shaw, passing by Bram Stoker, samuel Beckett or Iris Murdoch. And ending more contemporaries like John banville and new voices like Tana French or Marian keyes.
James Joyce
Desire prompts us to possess, to move towards something.
Errors are thresholds for discovery.
Oscar Wilde
The tragedy of old age is not that you are old, but that you are young.
The least common in this world is living. Most people exist, that's all.
George Bernard Shaw
Humans are the only animals I'm completely and truly scared of.
The heart of an Irishman is nothing more than his imagination.
Edna o'brien
Literature is the best thing after God.
Writers actually live in the mind and in the hotels of the soul.
Iris Murdock
If eternity is understood, not the endless temporal duration, but the absence of time, he who lives in the present lives eternally.
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit until one is amazed at his luck.
Elizabeth bowen
Jealousy is nothing more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Ireland is a great country to die or marry.
John Banville
The past beats inside me like a second heart.
Literature is one of the greatest inventions of mankind and one of the best forms of art.
Marian kayes
Political correctness is a minefield.
What is life but fleeting moments of happiness strung on a necklace of despair?
Bram Stoker
I have crossed oceans of time to find you.
It is in this way that memory plays its jokes, for better or for worse, to cause pleasure or pain, well-being or distress. This is what makes life sweet and bitter at the same time, and what has been given to us becomes eternal.
Samuel Beckett
The only sin is the sin of being born.
You are on Earth. There is no cure for that.
William Butler Yeats
Wine enters the mouth and love enters the eyes; this is all we really know before we grow old and die. So I bring the glass to my mouth, and I look at you, and sigh.
Step gently because you are stepping on my dreams.
Tana french
My father once told me that the most important thing a man should know is why he would die.
The people you knew as teenagers, the ones who saw your stupidest haircut and the most embarrassing things you've ever done, and still cared about you after all that - they're irreplaceable, you know?
Claire keegan
One of the things that I think a writing school should be is discouraging people from how much they write, and I really believe it and say it.
I believe that in any generation and in any country there are only a small number of good writers. Maybe one or two in my generation, and I don't think creative writing courses are going to promote the emergence of those voices, or prevent them from emerging.
Seamus Heaney
Your back is a firm eastern shoreline and your arms and legs extend beyond your gradual hills.
The earth to which we applied our ears for so long is skinned or very calloused, and its entrails are tempted by an impious omen. Our island is full of uncomfortable noises.
Sheridan LeFanu
A cruel love, a capricious love had invaded my life. Love demands sacrifices. And in the sacrifices the blood runs.
You will judge me cruel and selfish, very selfish, but remember that love is always like that. The more immense the passion, the more selfish it becomes.
The phrase, "I have crossed oceans of time to find you," is not by Bram Stoker, it does not appear in the novel. It's by Francis Ford Coppola for the movie.