Donal Ryan Quotes

How would I know what Jesus would have done? That fella was a mass of contradictions as far as I can see. One minute he says to turn the other cheek, the next minute he's having a big strop and kicking over lads' market stalls. He says blessed are the meek and he goes around shouting and roaring the odds to everyone. He rises from the dead and then shags off a few weeks later and leaves his buddies in the shit.

I wish to God I could talk to her the way she wants me to, besides forever making her guess what I'm thinking. Why can't I find the words?

Fiction serves a noble purpose, to oust secrecy, to obliterate shame, to use narrative as a blessed valve to relieve the awful pressure of the pent-up, unspoken pain of existence

The future is a cold mistress. You can give all your life looking to her and trying to catch hold of her but she'll always dance away from your fingertips and laugh back at you from the distance. Them that say they know are liars and thieves.

They loved him, or loved the thought of him, what they thought he was: a man who could easily have had a good life who chose instead their life: spite and bitterness and age-fogged glasses of watery whiskey in dark, cobwebbed country bars, shit-smeared toilets, blood-streaked piss, and early death. He could have helped it but didn't. They couldn't help it and loved him for being worse than them. He was the king of the wasters.

Sometimes I look at Daddy, at his side or his back or his face, and I love him so much that it feels like he's a prize I won for doing something brilliant, better than anyone else.

There's no man on this earth can even be assured he'll have a next day.

why can't I just want to be me?

Sure wasn't I at least the author of my own tale? And if you can say that as you depart this world, you can say a lot.

I took to numbers, their definiteness, their unyielding natures: even when you chop a number down to a half or a tenth or a millionth or a billionth part of its former self it still exists, it's still whole and pristine and incorruptible. When everything else is gone, when the universe has collapsed back in on itself and time itself has stopped, there'll still be numbers, frozen in the singularity, waiting for existence to push itself into being again, so they can put order on the great expansion, and tell it when it's reached its terminal mass, its ineluctable point of return to its beginning.

People are better inside in your head. When you're longing for them, they're perfect.

All talk is lies in a way. Only the doing of a thing can make it true.

The ways of some things are set, like the courses of rivers or the greenness of grass, or the trouble that follows my daddy, or the hard light of knowing in people's eyes.

That time is long gone. But aren't we still the same people?