Paul Lynch > Quotes

“History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore,”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“she sees how happiness hides in the humdrum, how it abides in the everyday toing and froing as though happiness were a thing that should not be seen, as though it were a note that cannot be heard until it sounds from the past...”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true – this is an old idea, of course, it really is nothing new, but you’re watching it happen in your own time and not in a book.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“Sooner or later pain becomes too great for fear and when the people’s fear has gone the regime will have to go.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“The end of the world is always a local event.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight, and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others,”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“... time is at once addition and subtraction, time adds one day to the next and always takes away from what's left...”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore,”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“It's plain as day what they're up to, he says, they're trying to chase out like vermin ,that's what they're doing, they want to exterminate it's like rats, it's just a matter of time and effort, I used to work as a city planner you know, there's a finite number of roads and buildings in this city, drop enough ordinance and after a time you have put a hole in every road, you'll have struck every block of flats, every shop and house then you keep going night and day you just keep dropping more and more until you smashed every structure into the ground and you keep going until you turn the brickwork into dust and there's nothing left but the people who refuse to leave”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“he will always be here because the love we are given when we are loved as a child is stored forever inside us, and your father has loved you so very much, his love for you cannot be taken away nor erased, please don’t ask me to explain this, you just need to believe it is true because it is so, it is a law of the human heart.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“he brings the torch down to her bloody feet and takes a look again into her eyes as though asking himself what does madness look like, it looks like this, not someone waving their arms and yelling at the gods but a mother trying to get back home to her children.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“...knowing how it is so that all boys grow up and pull away from home to unmake the world in the guise of making it, nature decrees it so.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“...if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing, Eilish, it is really quite simple, the NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one this is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true...”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“She is watching a man lying dead or asleep on a blanket nearby dressed in a crumpled tan suit with blood discolouring his sleeve, his hand clutching a plastic bag filled with bread rolls, alone black shoe on a foot. Another man she saw been carried into the emergency room was wearing just one sport shoe, so many shoes gone astray she thinks, so many shoes dislodged while their owners are carried by the arms and legs or dragged by the armpits into the backs of cars and vans and dragged again into emergency rooms without a gurney, the orphaned shoes kicked aside in the rush or left to die on the street or on footpaths like an unblinking eye awaiting the return of its owner”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“Watching the light now as it broods upon the street, a slow pulsation that gives to sudden clarity then dims, thinking about what lies hidden, seeing that what is revealed in the soft blooming light is the everyday occurring”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“...if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing, Eilish, it is really quite simple, te NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one this is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and you keep it saying it over and over people accept it as true...”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“...if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can later the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing, Eilish, it is really quite simple, te NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one this is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and you keep it saying it over and over people accept it as true...”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“both scientists, Eilish, we belong to a tradition but tradition is nothing more than what everyone can agree on”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“the love we are given when we are loved as a child is stored forever inside us,”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing, Eilish, it is really quite simple, the NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true – this is an old idea, of course, it really is nothing new, but you’re watching”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“He lifts his face and she sees the eyes of a man who has not slept and is met with pity for him, for what is known by the telling of the hands, how the man has been trained for the rules of the game but the game is changed so what now is the man?”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“the child absorbing the mother’s trauma and storing it in his body for later use, the child become adult stricken by dread and blind anxiety, lashing out at those around him, she is holding a damaged man in her arms.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“War shapes itself around them, gunfire that sounds like pneumatic drilling, shelling that drums the earth and sends shudders into the house, the windows and the wooden floors rattling...”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“Sooner or later pain becomes too great for fear and when the people's fear has gone the regime will have to go.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“one moment you are pruning trees and the next you are an improvised ambulance driver, wondering what it is the man will do with this when he tries to sleep tonight, watching the small child with the face full of shrapnel he helped carry into the van, watching it replay in his mind for the rest of his life.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“but the silence doesn’t end, you see, they leave open the possibility that what you want will be returned some day and so you remain reduced, paralysed, dull as an old knife, and the silence does not end because the silence is the source of their power, that is its secret meaning.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“He turns, momentarily taking a wild look at the sky. Why should we leave? he says, tell me that, they won’t get us out, we will live underground if we have to, I’ll dig a hole in my fucking garden, if you’ve lived in one place all your life the idea of living someplace else is impossible, it’s what do you call it, neurological, it’s wired into the brain, we’ll just dig in, that’s what we’ll do, what else are you supposed to do anyhow, I don’t know where else I’d go, they can drag me out in a coffin.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“...and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of...what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over...in one place but not another...the end of the world is always a local event....”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song