Billy O'Callaghan > Quotes

“On a level, they might be perfect for one another, but it's a theoretical perfection only, compromised by timing. Their bests passed one another on the way to here, and now exist epochs apart.”
― Billy O'Callaghan, The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind

“Dusk suited the ocean. The sun slipped away, having burnt the sky with the colours of heat and turning the water to blood and blackness.”
― Billy O'Callaghan, The Dead House

“Everything about the world ahead of me was color - subtle shades shared out among the tumbling fields and flashes of shoreline, the rocks, waves and sky- and that, I knew, was a glimpse of magic, too, an acknowledgement of my own feelings. because the water was blue, but not blue, it was grey, or green or kind of burnt silver that seemed far beyond the scope of something as simplified as paint. It was all of those, and none of them, and only the right sort of eye could see, and recognize, and understand. As usual, I was seeing it as I tended to see everything: in too simplified a way. As usual, I was blind to the depths and stories of the world.”
― Billy O'Callaghan, The Dead House

“Having what you need as well as what you want, and knowing that you have it, must be the definition of contentment.”
― Billy O'Callaghan, The Dead House

“... he had implored her silence. She'd given into him without wanting to realizing ...that the point where anything might have been done to save him was m
likely long past. And because she loved him. Surely nobody wants to betray the people they love, even when doing so might be for the best”
― Billy O'Callaghan, Life Sentences

“The air out here is mean with cold.”
― Billy O'Callaghan, My Coney Island Baby

“The passing years are supposed to soften what has gone before, but they don’t. Because for most of us, the past has nowhere to go. The best we can do is live beneath its weight.”
― Billy O'Callaghan, A Death in the Family

“... if I was less for having had them stripped from my life, then I also knew that I was nothing without the memory of them”
― Billy O'Callaghan, Life Sentences

“As I age, I find myself favouring novels and stories that I know will end happily, not because that makes them more believable but because the very inverse of that is true, because their sense of reality softens and they again get to be something more than the world as it has shown itself to me. Not bad all the way to its core and rarely intentionally so, not without its beautiful moments, but neither naturally set up, it seems, for happy endings.”
― Billy O'Callaghan, The Boatman and Other Stories

“might be the ceaseless repetition of who we are during our lowest moments, with our mistakes, the ones that have defined our lives, playing over and over to goad us for all eternity. But I hold on to the consolation that whether heaven or hell”
― Billy O'Callaghan, Life Sentences