Donal Ryan QUOTES

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

2 " 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. "

― Donal Ryan , The Spinning Heart

3 " Some things is easy do, when you have no choice in the world but to do them. Like shiteing into bedpan, in front of a nurse. "

― Donal Ryan , The Thing About December

4 " 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. "

― Donal Ryan , The Spinning Heart

5 " I kind of thought actually that Trevor was gone completely mental when he called up here a few weeks ago. Like, why would he not text or email or Facebook? What's with all the reality, I thought. Does he not know he's a million times cooler in virtual form? "

― Donal Ryan , The Spinning Heart

6 " him "

― Donal Ryan , Strange Flowers

7 " Writing fiction is the act of extending empathy to or beyond its natural limits. "

― Donal Ryan

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

― Donal Ryan , The Thing About December

9 " 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? "

― Donal Ryan , The Spinning Heart

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

― Donal Ryan , The Spinning Heart

11 " It was from the experience of blackening that boy that I learned an important and valuable lesson: if you say something enough times, the repetition of it makes it true. Any notion you like, no matter how mad it seems, can be a fact’s chrysalis. Once you say it loud enough and often enough it becomes debatable. Debates change minds. Debate is the larval stage of truth. Constant, unflagging, loud repetition completes your notion’s metamorphosis into fact. The fact takes wing and flutters from place to place and mind to mind and makes a living, permanent thing of itself. "

― Donal Ryan , From a Low and Quiet Sea

12 " Drunk, he was leering and silent and mostly asleep. Sober, he was a watcher, a horror of a man who missed nothing and commented on everything. Nothing was ever done right or cooked right or handed to him properly or ironed straight or finished off fully with him. "

― Donal Ryan , The Spinning Heart

13 " if you observe a man closely and properly you’ll eventually come to know the shade of his soul. No soul is brilliant white, save for the souls of infants. But there are men alive who will do evil without pause, who are without mercy, and there are men alive who would rather die than harm another, and all of the rest of us fall somewhere in between. "

― Donal Ryan , From a Low and Quiet Sea

14 " and wasn't it an awful dangerous thing, a text message, because once you pressed that little send button, that was it. Like pulling a trigger of a shotgun and sending a pellet into a little rabbit's brain as he sniffed the sweet spring air. You couldn't undo it. You couldn't ever take it back. "

― Donal Ryan , The Thing About December

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

― Donal Ryan , The Thing About December

16 " That's the thing about December: it goes by you in a flash. If you just close your eyes, it's gone. And it's like you were never there. "

― Donal Ryan , The Thing About December

17 " That's the way of things, sometimes, my father said. Things happen inside a person that they think they have no control over, and it turns out they do, but they need to be told by someone else. "

― Donal Ryan , All We Shall Know

18 " 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. "

― Donal Ryan , From a Low and Quiet Sea

19 " And once a thing enters a person’s mind, it’s always there, like woodworm in the leg of a chair, like cells of cancer, like rats in the cavities of the earth; it can’t ever be fully eradicated. Even things long forgotten remain in the dark infinity of the mind; there’s no unlearning. What’s said can’t be unsaid. And no law in this universe is immutable. "

― Donal Ryan , From a Low and Quiet Sea

20 " What’s in the past can’t be changed and what’s to come can’t be known and you can’t give your life to worrying. Sure you can’t. All you have to do is be kind and you’ll have lived a good life. "

― Donal Ryan , From a Low and Quiet Sea

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