Ronan Hession > Quotes

“Humans are by nature romantic creatures. By that I don't mean full of love: I mean that they like the idea of things more than the reality of them.”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“But isn’t that what allowing yourself be loved is all about – letting something greater than fear into your life?”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“Solitude and peace lose their specialness when they no longer stand in contrast to anything. In a busy—or at least busier—life, quiet reflection provides resonance to experience. But to deprive life of experiences deliberately and to hide from its realities was not special. It was just another form of fear that led to a life-limiting loneliness that accumulated and accumulated until it became so big that it blocked up the front door, drowned out conversations and put other people behind soundproof glass.”
― Ronan Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul

“Sometimes I want to take on the whole world and then there are other times … when all I want is for the world to take care of me.”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“Relationships never truly ended, and even when people faded from you their effect was preserved somewhere in the particle physics of experience where everything is a compound made up of traces of everything else.”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“As you both change, you will periodically lose each other. You need to find each other again and—here’s the trick—instead of trying to rekindle what you had, you need to reinvent yourselves and your relationship. You have to keep starting new relationships with the same person.”
― Ronan Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul

“Let’s not name it. Once you name something, you have to define it: say what it is and isn’t. Not to mention maintenance. All the relationships with names – parent, sister, husband, lover – come with maintenance. All that effort keeping it to what it’s supposed to be. Shouldn’t we allow ourselves at least one unnamed, undefined close relationship in our lives? A free-standing, wild-card arrangement. How about it, Joseph? How about you just try to make me happy, and I’ll try and do the same for you?”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“I think I was in this state where I needed to be surrounded by love but couldn't let it touch me.”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“Humans are by nature romantic creatures. By that I don’t mean full of love: I mean that they like the idea of things more than the reality of them.”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“Life should always be like that. Resting safely, with someone looking over you, attending to the little indulgences that loved people enjoy”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“Don’t put people off. Don’t think you can make up the time later.”
― Ronan Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul

“You were like a dangerous sun: even at a distance you could still burn me... You were close enough to exist, but never close enough to hold onto.”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“There’s no point planning for what you’re trying to plan for. I know that, more than anything, you would like me to see the world your way, to wake up to your way of looking at things and to become the version of myself that you’re most comfortable with.”
― Ronan Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul

“The thing is, as a child the world looked huge, intimidatingly so. School looked big. Adults looked big. The future looked big. But I am starting to feel that over time I have retreated into a smaller world. I see people rushing around and I wonder—where are they going to? Who are they meeting? Their lives are so full. I’ve been trying to remember if my life was ever like that.”
― Ronan Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul

“To him love was no union between two otherwise incomplete halves, but more like the gravity that locked two bodies into the same orbit”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“Though this was all still quite new to him, he could see that making big decisions was just as consequential as not making them. Either way you were committing to something. We are never entirely outside of life’s choices; everything leads somewhere.”
― Ronan Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul

“But illness meant dependency. It was society’s last chance to push the benefits of membership.”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“Panenka, guilty of one thing, had by extension become guilty of all things”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“Yes, our parents will grow old and yes they will get sick and yes they will die, but that will happen to us two as well. Where you’re wrong is that you think that’s a problem in the future. But it’s not. The answer to that problem is to spend time with them now. Be in their lives so that when the worst happens—which we hope is many years away—there will have been ten, twenty, however many years of Scrabble, University Challenge, curries, walks, gardening and whatever else behind us. And then, when the time comes we’ll know what to do. Not because we’ll have it all figured it out but because we will have had the habit, the practice, of loving them and being with them, and the utter clarity that comes with that. Mam and Dad have enjoyed the wedding so much because they speak to you all the time and you’re calling over, and you’re including them. You being here has reminded them of how much they miss you when you’re busy. They don’t really want a holiday, they just want to know that you won’t forget about them when it’s all over. You need to go and be happy with Andrew, and unfetter yourself from this story you have about your role in the family. And then, when you come over—once a week, once a month, whenever you can, it doesn’t matter—just hang out and be yourself.”
― Ronan Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul

“It is hard to appreciate now, but there was once a time before mobile phones and text messages when people communicated with each other by sticking notes to refrigerators using magnets. It got to be so commonplace that it became the secondary purpose of fridges themselves. Families would leave dinner instructions, teenagers would explain their whereabouts, and unhappy wives would initiate divorces, all using short Heminway-esque messages affixed at eye level using coloured magnetic letters. In fact there was a widespread panic in the refrigeration industry when text messages became popular. And then, when free texts became available, the National Association of Subzero Appliances (the other NASA, as they called themselves) brought a case to the Supreme Court, citing an infringement of their right to earn a livelihood.”
― Ronan Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul

“For so long I was afraid to stay close to anybody because I had so much anger and confusion inside me. I knew that I couldn't let anyone into my life until all that had passed. The problem I could never solve was how to relate to people in the meantime. Other people's love is frightening when you're suffering. It's overwhelming. When you're consumed with the effort of processing internal pain, it becomes impossible to do anything else. It's like holding your breath under water: you realise that you need to breathe but if you breathe at the wrong time, you drown. I only survived thanks to the people in my life -- people I repaid by letting them down.”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“Bir ilişkide denge bir kez kaybolduğunda kendi kendini yeniden kuracağı umuduyla tekrar etkinleştiren ve kendi kendini düzelten bir mekanizma yoktu.”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“The short run can often be full of feelings,’ observed Hungry Paul, sagely.”
― Ronan Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul

“You may wish to note the above”
― Ronan Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul

“Leonard wore a new feeling of peace. He had always associated peace with the idea of happiness, as if it were some sort of steady state that happiness turned into when it was for real. But now he realized that peace is independent of any one feeling. The deep peace that he now felt was in a minor key. It was not blissful, but melancholy. It was a profound acceptance of things as the were, devoid of superficial preferences. The weight of effort that it took to be happy was lifted from his bones.”
― Ronan Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul

“What I learned is that everyone in your life has an invisible number on their foreheads, which represents the number of times you will see them again. It might be zero or one, or it could be a thousand, but it’s a number. We don’t have unlimited time with people. I don’t mean that in a morbid way. It’s a lesson for us to appreciate people while we can. Don’t put people off. Don’t think you can make up the time later.”
― Ronan Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul

“There were times, she would admit, when for all her heroic independence, her sacred resilience, she would have liked to trust her weight to the love of another person like that. To fall backwards in absolute security. Bu she had only known doubting love. Love that needed to be weighed against what it cost. She was exhausted. Everything was so hard.”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“But it was too late. He had already slipped into a deep depression and developed a dangerous indifference to himself. To describe it as sadness would be to ascribe a degree of feeling that was lacking in him during that period which lasted for — who knows? — perhaps weeks, months, or maybe almost twenty-five years.”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“pact to resist the vortex of busyness and insensitivity that had engulfed the rest of the world.”
― Ronan Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul

“With no mobile phone, he was not tempted to scroll through his texts or refresh his social media feed. His freedom from restlessness meant that he didn’t explore his nasal cavities or fiddle with his zip. His mental stillness left him untroubled by the passage of time or the spooky run-down emptiness of the place.”
― Ronan Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul