97 quotes found
Author · Irish · 1965
Irish author (born 1965)
“There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.”
“A good novel can be a doorstop to despair.”
“Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.”
“...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.”
“All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.”
“There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water--it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom bunk again, liste...”
“Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.”
“Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.”
“The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.”
“Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.”
“The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no”
“An optimist is a braver cynic.”
“It's strange but as I grow older, I find myself developing more optimism. I keep inching toward the point where I believe that it's more difficult to have hope than it is to embrace cynicism. In th...”
“Im not interested in blind optimism, but Im very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, This is not enough. But it takes time, more time than we can sometime...”
“I could tell from Anna's face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have...”
“Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.”
“Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was non ov those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.”
“His body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own people to whom he was pledged. Three million. They were the currency of his freedom.”
“The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American slavery in place. Sometimes it withered him just to keep his mind steady. He was aware that the ...”
“There are no days more full than those we go back to.”
