Quotes from John Boyne

line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt had once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart's invisible furies on his face.

Why are you so afraid of people being happy? he read. Why can't you just live and let live?

Is it too much to ask for decent transportation during one's lifetime?

I suppose you wish you'd won the war." I raised an eyebrow. "Oh, Mr. Darcy-Witt," I said, as if I were explaining something obvious to a child. "No one wins a war.

His position, like so many of his ilk, was one of uncontested and unearned respect.

You reach a point where you realize that your life must go on regardless. You choose to live or you choose to die. But then there are moments, things that you see, something funny on the street or a good joke that you hear, a television program that you want to share, and it makes you miss the person who's gone terribly and then it's not grief at all, it's more a sort of bitterness at the world for taking them away from you.

I like 'fresh fruit flan', said the donkey. Three excellent words. I don't have one, said Noah immediately before the question could even be asked, and the donkey opened his eyes wide in suprise, and for a moment Noah wondered whether he might even consider eating him.

I stared at him and felt the tears forming in my eyes. "Do you know how much I've missed you?" I asked him. "It's been almost thirty years. I shouldn't have had to spend all that time on my own.

that life had manifested the heart's invisible furies on his face.

They sat there in ascending order of age and stupidity.

Whenever I look at Edna O'Brien," continued Mr. Denby-Denby, "I get the impression that she wants to put every man she meets across her knee and give them a good spanking until they show her the proper respect. Oh, to be the bare bottom beneath that alabaster palm!

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.

It's not so long ago that men of your ilk believed in witches and superstition," I pointed out. "Medieval times," he said, waving a hand in the air to dismiss the notion. "This is 1867. The Church has come a long way since then.

it seemed like a great adventure, at least at the start.

What do dreams mean anyway? They're just a lot of silly nonsense.' 'Or wish fulfilment. The subconscious representation of our true desires.

Every man is afraid of women as far as I can see.

No woman will ever take care of my children but me, she said. I will not allow it, do you understand? And after I am gone Madge Toxley, if you try to make them yours, then you will live to regret it.

What you know about women,' replied Maude, 'could be written in large font on the back of a postage stamp and there'd still be room for the Lord's Prayer.

In school, the other girls formed alliances which always excluded me. They called me names; I will not repeat them here. They made fun of my unshapely body, my pale skin, my untamed hair. I do not know why I was born this way.

It was … difficult at first,' he said. 'I am a person. But I seemed to forget in time …' 'Forget what?' 'That they were people too.

Something must be done. Not just for him but for all the Pierrots out there. The Führer will destroy the whole country if he's not stopped. The whole of Europe. He says that he is illuminating the minds of the German people—but no, he is the darkness at the center of the world.

Life is suffering. Until the great day of judgement, when peace and equanimity may be restored for those who are pure of heart and deed.

uniforms allow us to exercise our cruelty without ever feeling guilt.

Every man is afraid of women as far as I can see, said Julian, displaying an understanding of the universe far beyond his years. That's true, she said. But only because 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.