Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.
I'm only telling you on the truth," he said. "If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.
The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.
Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.
There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.
I have different books for different times of the day, let alone different seasons of the year!
The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.
I have the most charmed, most - I feel entirely blessed and lucky that I have the life that I have.
Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.
I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.
I write about what I know; and I write about things that are new to me, and that I didn't know before.
Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.
Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
Anakana Schofield is part of a new wave of wonderful Irish fiction-international in scope and electrically alive.
He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.
People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.
She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.
One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.
He might have been naive, but he didn't care; he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.
Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.
We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.
We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.
She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.
That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.
When I come home, I say I'm coming home to Dublin. When I'm in Dublin, I say I'm going home to New York. I'm sort of a man of two countries.
The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.
...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.
People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.
There are fewer and fewer Jews in Ireland, but we still have one of the most famous Jewish characters in literary history, of course, in Leopold Bloom.
I'm not interested in blind optimism, but I'm very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, 'This is not enough.'
Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.
I don't know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They're the only thing we have that can trump life itself.
Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns. There's the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.
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.
Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.
The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldnt.
The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldn't.
She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.
Very seldom in my fiction have I directly used the stories people have told me. I think ripping off people's lives in fiction is dangerous. It also lacks imagination.
There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.
It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.
I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.
In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.
He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they're hungry. The way he said it went something like: Glorify their appetites.
'Let the Great World Spin' at the end talks a lot about connections and light and possibility and the fact that the world doesn't end. Even in the darkest times, we have to go on.
Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.
They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.
And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.
I mean, every novel's a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don't want your novels to be mannered.