Quotes from John Boyne

If Dr. Allenby thought she had any concept of what guilt was, then she was fooling herself. Guilt was what kept you awake in the middle of the night or, if you managed to sleep, poisoned your dreams. Guilt intruded upon any happy moment, whispering in your ear that you had no right to pleasure. Guilt followed you down streets, interrupting the most mundane moments with remembrances of days and hours when you could have done something to prevent tragedy but chose to do nothing.

After all, the great joy of literature, as opposed to politics or religion, is that it embraces differing opinions, it encourages debate, it allows us to have heated conversations with our closest friends and dearest loved ones. And through it all, no one gets hurt, no one gets taken away from their homes, and no one gets killed.

That was guilt.

If you ask me,' she adds, pointing towards the book in her husband's lap, the stern visage of its subject, Alexander Graham Bell, staring back at her, 'that fucker has a lot to answer for.

And that's the end of the story about Bruno and his family. Of course all this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again. Not in this day and age.

True horror is all the more potent for being implicit.

The truth is that I can't remember a moment when I didn't want to be a writer. From childhood, I loved books, I loved stories and I loved writing my own

Wenn ein Mensch nachts in den Himmel schaut, heißt das noch lange nicht, dass er Astronom ist - Pavel

Wann bist du in Aus-Wisch angekommen? fragte Bruno. [...] Ich glaube, ich war schon immer hier sagte er schließlich leise. Bist du hier aufgewachsen? Nein, sagte Pavel und schüttelte den Kopf. Nein, das nicht.

Bruno was jealous, he had to wear stupid pants en shoes while the boys at the other side of the fence were wearing nice pyjamas al day long

Ein Junge, der bereit war, neue Menschen kennenzulernen. Ein Junge, der neue Abenteuer erleben wollte. Und vor allem: ein Junge der stolz darauf war, anders zu sein.

A vida é fácil de narrar, mas atordoante de se praticar. Uma História de Solidão

You're my best friend, Shmuel, ... My best friend for life. - The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

E só naquele momento, com o dia já quase no fim, a gente finalmente começou a conversar. Era como se fôssemos agentes secretos, mas tivéssemos cansado de tudo e decidido simplesmente abandonar o disfarce. (Cinco)

De qualquer jeito, eu tinha completado treze anos e achava que já era tempo de seguir meu próprio tempo. (Nove)

The powers that be, the Great Unelected Consciences of the World, didn't approve of what she said and that was the end of her.

He wore the headdress of a Red Indian and was making the sounds to match, a terrible howling that would have given a deaf man a headache.

But for all that we had, for all the luxury to which we were accustomed, we were both denied love, and this deficiency would be scorched into our future lives like an ill-considered tattoo inscribed on the buttocks after a drunken night out, leading each of us inevitably towards isolation and disaster.

had I known at the time who Joan Crawford was, I would have said that she was giving us her very best Joan Crawford, an expression that mixed contempt and vulnerability as she took a long drag of her cigarette and blew the smoke from her lips so steadily that it created a miasma behind which her true feelings could hide.

It was 1959, after all. I knew almost nothing of homosexuality, except for the fact that to act on such urges was a criminal act in Ireland that could result in a jail sentence, unless of course you were a priest, in which case it was a perk of the job.

Mrs Hogan and her son Henry, however, lived in the house next door – the former entirely mute, the latter completely blind – and yet between them they monitored our comings and goings with all the efficiency of a government intelligence agency. Like conjoined twins, the two were never seen apart, Henry's arm permanently attached to his mother's as she led him to and from Mass every morning and up and down the street for his evening constitutional.

That's good to hear. There's nothing more tedious than a grown man blaming his parents, birth or otherwise, for all the things that have gone wrong in his life.

I'm 25 admitted the ghost. But I feel much older How old do you feel? Ancient, sometimes. Like, 30

Dracula would have felt less fear examining his own reflection.