Quotes from John Boyne

I sometimes feel as if I wasn't supposed to live among people at all. As if I would be happier on a little island somewhere, all alone with my books and some writing material for company. I could grow my own food and never have to speak to a soul.

They were afraid of them, you see. Frightened of ideas. Frightened of the truth. People still are

Tell a story often enough and it becomes the truth.

I sat down again, wishing I had never been brought here. It was as if I had walked onstage into the middle of a dramatic play, where the other characters are already engaged in a battle that has been going on for some years but which only now, upon my arrival, is allowed to reach a climax.

It was almost (Shmuel thought) as if they were all exactly the same really.

Empezaba a darse cuenta de lo maleducadas que podían ser algunas personas cuando se topaban con alguien de un aspecto un poco distinto

You wear the right outfit and you feel like the person you're pretending to be.

Waarom zou vader op zo'n nare plek willen werken met al die buren? Het slaat nergens op.

I need to get back to the office. Those windows won't stare out themselves all afternoon.

I went to Poland once, actually,' said Eleanor, pushing her plate aside now, having eaten no more than half the food upon it. 'As part of a school trip. They took us to Kraków for three days and, on the middle day, we visited Auschwitz.

the world is a completely fucked-up place. You never know what's around the corner and it's often something unpleasant.

Cuando cerraba los ojos, sólo notaba vacío y frío alrededor, como si se hallara en el lugar más solitario del planeta. Era como el fondo de la nada.

Standing there in your uniform,' she continued, 'as if it makes you something special. Not even caring what it means really. What it stands for.

the usual nonsense that people who know nothing about anything, like me, say when they don't want their own days to be ruined by worrying about others.

The suggestion, however, regarding my age – that I am perhaps not quite fifty years old – would flatter me immensely. For it is many years now since I have been able to say in all honesty that I have only seen half a century. This is simply the age, or at least the visual representation of an age, at which I have been stuck for a large proportion of my 256 years of life. I am an old man.

Maybe there were no villains in my mother's story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing.

the priests said that food was not there to be enjoyed but simply to keep us alive. Simplicity of diet was important.

it's something that every girl realizes at some point in her life, usually when she's around fifteen or sixteen. Maybe it's even younger now. That she has more power than every man in the room combined, because men are weak and governed by their desires and their desperate need for women but women are strong. I've always believed that if women could only collectively harness the power that they have then they'd rule the world.

I find that many handsome young men are cads

I blame Steve Jobs. And that Zuckerberg fellow. All those clever little psychopaths who couldn't get laid in high school but make up for their sexual inadequacy by inventing technology that destroys humanity. They're the Oppenheimers of the twenty-first century.

By doing nothing, you did everything. By taking no responsibility, you bear all responsibility.

Todo esto, por supuesto, pasó hace mucho, mucho tiempo, y nunca podría volver a pasar nada parecido. Hoy en día, no.

You can hurt me if you like, I whispered, closing my eyes, thinking that he might slap me hard, drive his fist into my stomach, break my nose. Why would you want that? he asked, his tone betraying an innocence that believed his beauty. So I'll know that I'm alive.

You were a terrible monster of a man and wherever you are you should feel shame for the way you lived your life.