Quotes from John Boyne

It's the countryside. Perhaps this is our holiday home.

But this was Dublin, the nation's capital. The place of my birth and a city I loved at the heart of a country I loathed. A town filled with good-hearted innocents, miserable bigots, adulterous husbands, conniving churchmen, paupers who received no help from the State, and millionaires who sucked the lifeblood from it.

He's crazy, Bruno said, twirling a finger in circles around the side of his head and whistling to indicate just how crazy he thought he was. He went up to a cat on the street the other day and invited her over for afternoon tea. What did the cat say? asked Gretel, who was making a sandwich in the corner of the kitchen. Nothing. explained Bruno. It was a cat.

There were others, such as Jack London,who offered their readers such a respite from the miserable horror of existence that their books were like gifts from the gods. (Character of Tristan Sadler in the Absolutist)

The first thing he noticed was how quiet it was. This was nothing like the kind of quiet he heard when he woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. When that happened, there were always strange, unidentifiable sounds seeping into his room from the tiny gaps where the windowpanes weren't sealed together correctly. At those moments he could always tell there was life outside, even if all that life was fast asleep. It was a silence that wasn't silence at all.

If it wasn't for the fact that Bruno was nowhere near as skinny as the boys on his side of the fence, and not quite so pale either, it would have been difficult to tell them apart. It was almost (Shmuel thought) as if they were all exactly the same really.

Most men are not as smart as women and yet they continue to hold all the power. They fear a change of the world order.

Seated opposite me in the railway carriage, the elderly lady in the fox-fur shawl was recalling some of the murders that she had committed over the years.

Father laughed, which upset Bruno even more; there was nothing that made him more angry than when a grown-up laughed at him for not knowing something, especially when he was trying to find out the answer by asking questions.

The people are behind him for now. He has infected them with his hatred. He demands absolute loyalty, and when anyone dares to criticize him, they lose their position. I think he will lead a great army, but what will be the result?

I didn't blow anyone!' he roared. 'If anyone was getting blown it was me. Although, of course, it wasn't me anyway, as it never happened.' 'That's a great quote,' said Mr Denby-Denby. 'We should definitely put that into the press release. I don't blow teenage boys. They blow me.

I've always felt that the Catholic Church has the same relationship to God as a fish has to a bicycle.

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 futures lives like an ill-considered tattoo inscribed on the buttocks after a drunken night out, leading each of us inevitably toward isolation and disaster.

And shortly after that the blob became a figure. And then, as Bruno got even closer, he saw that the thing was neither a dot nor a speck nor a blob nor a figure, but a person.

I had told the truth, or a version of it, anyway.

I think Maurice is whatever he needs to be, whenever he needs to be it. He's an operator, that's for sure.

It has always astonished me, Georgy Daniilovich, that those who are most repulsed by autocratic or dictatorial rule are among the first to eliminate their enemies once they take on the mantle of power themselves.

You know, Emily Dickinson is here too. All she does is write poems about life all the time. The irony! She keeps asking me to read them. I refuse, of course. The days are long enough as it is.

Sure the priests ran the country back then and they hated women. Oh my God, they hated women and anything that had to do with women and anything to do with women's bodies or ideas or desires, and any chance that they had to humiliate a woman or bring her down, they would take full advantage of it.

It was the fact that I didn't want to kill anyone. I wasn't put on this earth to murder my fellow man. I'd grown up with violence - can't you see that? I can't bear it.

Hay veces en que le envidio su juventud, pero trato de no pensar mucho en eso. Un anciano no debe tener celos de aquellos que vienen a ocupar su puesto, y recordar el tiempo en que era joven, sano y viril es un acto de masoquismo que no sirve de nada.

Se me ocurre que, incluso aunque Zoya y yo aún seguimos vivos, mi vida ha concluido ya. No tardaré en perderla y no habrá razón para que continúe sin ella. Verán, es que somos una sola persona. Somos GeorgiZoya.

You are not there, Father," I cried. "I wake up at Gaudlin Hall, I spend most of my day there, I sleep there at night. And throughout it all there is but one thought running through my mind." "And that is?" "This house is haunted.

I never really noticed it any more, in the way that one often ignores familiar things, like seat cushions or loved ones.