Quotes from John Boyne

My mother was Eveline Hartford," said Maude, as if this would mean something to one or the other of us. "So as you know, she simply adored chairs.

Please don't let Julian die, I asked God. And please stop me from being a homosexual. Only when I stood up and walked away did I realize that that had been two prayers, so I went back and lit a second candle, which cost me another penny.

When you sit down with a book, you are separating yourself out of your world for a few hours and getting lost in the story.

before we learn to feel afraid of things, our bodies know how to do them anyway. It's one of the more disappointing aspects of growing older. We fear more so we can do less.

I married up several times. And then across once or twice. And then beneath me. I never quite found the right level somehow. Perhaps I should have married diagonally or in a slightly curved direction.

The sensation that for the world to exist with an object of such beauty in it—and for that object to be unattainable—was the very sweetest kind of pain imaginable.

Is it really that easy for the innocent to be corrupted?

There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them. John Boyne April 28, 1789: The real-life mutiny that inspired John Boyne's novel, Mutiny on the Bounty, took place aboard the HMS Bounty 224 years ago today. Half the ship's crew, seduced by several months of good life on Tahiti, rose up against Captain William Bligh. Some of the mutineers' descendants still live on Pitcairn Island

I stood up and offered not a prayer, for that was of no use to anyone, but a moment of contemplation.

Cyril, you remember Peter and Ruth, don't you?' she said. 'Of course' I replied. 'Happy Christmas. Nice to see you both again.' 'Happy Christmas to you,' said Peter, an enormous man bursting out of an extra-large shirt. 'And may the blessings of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior be with you on this momentous day.' 'Fair enough,' I said 'Hello, Ruth.

Well, I'm not advocating it," I said. "I just mean that before we learn to feel afraid of things, our bodies know how to do them anyway. It's one of the more disappointing aspects of growing older. We fear more so we can do less.

He held it out to Maude, who leaned forward, keeping her eyes locked on his as the cigarette began to spark, and then she sat back again, her left hand poised on the mattress behind her. She continued to stare at him before turning her face towards the ceiling and blowing a great cloud of white smoke in the air, as if she was preparing to announce the election of a new Pope.

Bruno had a pain in his stomach and he could feel something growing inside him, something that when it worked its way up from the lowest depths inside him to the outside world would either make him shout and scream that the whole thing was wrong and unfair and a big mistake for which somebody would pay one of these days, or just make him burst into tears instead.

In that direction only pain lies.

Why do they hate us so much anyway?' I asked after a lengthy pause. 'If they're not queer themselves, then what does it matter to them if someone else is?' 'I remember a friend of mine once telling me that we hate what we fear in ourselves,' she said with a shrug.

Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.

You have many years ahead of you to come to terms with your complicity in these matters. Just don't ever tell yourself that you didn't know." She released him now from her grip. "That would be the worst crime of all.

The only thing I'd tell Maude, if she was here, is that she runs the risk of sounding a little anti-man at times, don't you agree? All the husbands in her novels are stupid, insensitive, faithless individuals with murky pasts, empty heads, micro-penises and questionable morals. But I suppose she had a good imagination, as all writers must, and she was simply making things up.

Don't you have any principles, Tristan? he asks me. Principles for which you would lay down your life? No, I say. People perhaps, but not principles. What good are they?

Îns?, în timp ce reflect? astfel, picioarele îl duser? pas cu pas din ce în ce mai aproape de punctul din dep?rtare, care între timp devenise o pat?, apoi se transform? într-un strop. ?i în curând dup? aceea, stropul deveni o siluet?. Dup? care, când Bruno se apropie È™i mai mult, v?zu c? nu era nici punct, nici pat?, nici strop, nici siluet?, ci o f?ptur?. De fapt, era un b?iat.

Do you think . . . ? 'I do sometimes, my boy,'admitted the old man. 'When I can't avoid it.

I'm not praying, she said. I'm remembering. Sometimes the two things look alike, that's all.

it struck me as extraordinary that the leaders of each of these countries bore such an intimate familial relationship to each other. It was as if the entire matter was nothing more than a childish game: Willy, Georgie, and Nicky running around a garden, setting out their forts and toy soldiers, enjoying an afternoon of great sport until one of them went too far and they had to be separated by a responsible adult.

Just because someone looks sky at night, doesn`t mean it is astronaut.