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1 " Each of us, perhaps, holds the idea of such a place, the one we long to see more than anywhere else - and for this reason we should avoid ever going there. It thus remains a zone of desire and enigma, a space on the map onto which we project our capacity for enchantment. "
― Rob Doyle , Autobibliography
2 " It is difficult, when we look back on certain periods of our lives, not to succumb to romanticism and nostalgia. Even while I lived in London, though, I romanticised the city and the life I lived there; or rather, I knew it was a beautiful, romantic time of life, and that, like youth itself, the circumstances that had come so magically together would never be repeated, and that one day I would regret those years. Although I sometimes tantalise myself with the idea of moving to London again, I don't need Heraclitus to remind me that you can't step into the same city twice. The London where I lived no longer exists, any more than a dream exists upon awakening - a dream in which you were happy, in which life lived up to its promise. "
3 " I could live this way indefinitely and I'd be all right ... I've done enough living and can now spend my time holding up the memories for contemplation, determining what it all meant. Images flood in: cities I've passed through; rooms where I've slept; friends who put me up or put up with me. In a couple of years I'll turn forty. Schopenhauer wrote that the first forty years are the text, the rest is the commentary. I see that, and yet I feel that I'm somehow at the start of a life, on the cusp, facing a future that's strange and turbulent but not entirely hopeless. "
4 " We get tattoos in the same spirit in which we write books. The crucial thing in both cases is to do it while you still have the nerve to say what’s true before it gets overlaid by other truths. Write books full of insight you know will vanish, that you know you’ll come to regret voicing even, before you become someone else, someone mellower or happier, more compromised or timid, someone who can no longer withstand the truths you have it in you now to express. Even if you eventually regard such truths as dangerous mistakes, they’ll have been your stepping stones to the knowledge of the future. Books and tattoo must be records of disappearing ideals. "
5 " Buddhism offered a blueprint for living that was not moralistic but rational – Buddhists rarely spoke of good or evil, only of skilful or unskilful actions. It did not require the abdication of reason but rather reason’s "
― Rob Doyle , Threshold
6 " It is said that any populace is only three missed meals away from revolution, but not enough has been made of the insurrectionary potential of a water supply that unexpectedly dries up. "
7 " All in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless "
8 " Time rushes past. We become swept up in life’s tumult. Years go by, full of drama and event. We roam the world. And then, during moments of calm, we see that time hasn’t really gone anywhere, just as we ourselves are right where we were ten years earlier, though our skin is tougher and lines are etched in our faces. "
9 " We are all deep in a hell, each moment of which is a miracle. — Rob Doyle, from “Winter in Paris.” The Dublin Review. No. 58 Summer 2015. "
― Rob Doyle
