Quotes from Joseph O'Connor

Everything is in the way the material is composed.

They had no previous connection whatever with Connemara; but they saw connections where others who should have seen them simply looked the other way.

Any assemblage comprising human beings, any family, any party, any tribe, any nation, will bind itself together not by what it shares but ultimately by what it fears, which is often so much greater. Perhaps it abhors the outsider as camouflage for its own alarms; dreading what it would do to itself were the binding to fall asunder.

They had far more in common than either realised. One was born Catholic, the other Protestant. One was born Irish, the other British. But neither was the greatest difference between them. One was born rich and the other poor.

The world's full of idiots, divas and assholes, mainly in Ireland. In Ireland, one cannot achieve anything if he is not a little wacky. That's a holy truth. It just simply cannot be otherwise.

There is nothing worse than the ambitions of a talentless person.

That each man is the sum of his choices is nothing less than the truth. And each, perhaps, is also something else.

How the prisoner and the immigrant are treated by the government, how the poor are treated and those without influence: this is secretly how the government would like to treat us all.

And if ever you wanted to quit your impatient girl truly, and our little story had to be stored away in a room that's only sometimes remembered, that's still a room I'd want, and I'd go there now and again, like some room in an old hotel on a seafront someplace where two sinners did something they shouldn't. Do you mind what I am telling you? It is the God's honest truth. Even if I never saw you or heard from you again, you'd already have been the miracle of my life.

Most things between a woman and a man cannot be understood, it's why people invented love poems, a way of filling in the silence.

Happy as a threaded needle

The English possessed as many words for stealing as the Irish had for seaweed or guilt.

Politics' the polite word for antediluvian prejudices, the rags put on by enmity and tribal resentment.

but as his father used to say when he had a few drinks taken, you couldn't expect bloody miracles when you were talking about God.

Truly the angels are come among us every day. Our difficulty is so often that in our vanity and worldliness we so utterly fail to recognise them for what they are.

He was a beautiful man. What more than this need be said? The sort of man who makes you think the movement of foliage might be causing the breeze.

Oh so maddening, how memory works, or doesn't work, when you are old. Every square in a counterpane you owned when you were five, you remember the sequence, the colours. But then people were so important to you, and now even their names are melted away.

It was mankind and not the Almighty that had ordered the universe; only a man could look at an accident and call it a creation with Himself at the centre.

have come to see that neutrality is the most extremist stance of all; without it, no tyranny can flourish.

Confronting authority, one has only two choices: Surrender, or try to confuse it.

Iest?j?s klusums. It k? starp jums b?tu nost?jies nel?gts apnikums. Tu redz?ji, ka ar? vi?š nož?lo, ka uzaicin?jis tevi.

Abbiamo sempre una scelta. Siamo anzi la somma delle nostre scelte.

If you do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. If what you are doing is not working, do something else.

I feel these days like a very large flamingo. No matter what way I turn, there is always a very large bill.