Paul Kearney > Quotes

“I have found that there are two ways of dealing with men. Either you treat them with respect, or you kill them. Anything in between merely breeds resentment and the desire for revenge.”
― PAUL KEARNEY

“Places ain't home. People is. Bricks and chairs is nothing.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“It must be terrible to be old, when you love someone who died young. They never change in your mind, and every day you see yourself grow away from that person you were when you loved and knew them. Until you are more of a shadow than they are, and the girl you were is altogether gone, more dead even than that young man on the battlefield.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“Grief is the price we pay for having loved.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“No man could truly say what he was until he had been pushed to the edge of things with the precipice of his own ruin staring up at him.”
― Paul Kearney, Hawkwood's Voyage

“The time is coming to an end when you can wander the roads of the world as free and easy as you like, and meet a stranger across firelight. They will fence in the world entire ere they are done, the clever men of this earth, and there will be no space left on it for vagabonds, and dreamers... and little lost girls running from their fate.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“Memories are important, like the bones of the mind. We build ourselves upon them, flesh and blood moulded around the pictures of what is past. I”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“But we cannot choose what we remember and what we forget. All the lovely bright moments of our lives get forgotten except for remnants here and there, like the leaves blown from a tree in the autumn, and the terrible things, they stick with us forever, as bright and raw as the day they happened.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“It's all very well to say beauty is under the skin, or in the eye of the beholder, but no-one would say no to being prettier if they had the chance, so it is all rot.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“What do they be teaching the young these days? I declare, they think more on machines and formulas than they do on the true knowledge of the world. They blow things up, and calls it progress. They kills one another by the million, and calls it civilization.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“He liked having the boy there beside him. Like some bright flame of life still burning bright beside the spent lamp of his own spirit.”
― Paul Kearney, Kings of Morning

“He is a Christian, and believes charity begins at home. And often it remains there.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“Fairytales are true. The wolf is big and bad and I am talking to him right here and now. I”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“That is why we do not know where Mama is buried, or if she has a grave at all. The Turks had dragged her away earlier in the day, when we were packed on the roasting quayside; thousands and thousands of terrified people, with the water full of bodies in front of us, and the roaring of the great fire behind. I wish I could forget it; the thunder-heat of the flames, and the sound of the screaming as the Turks took away the young girls and the pretty women, and shot and bayoneted the husbands and fathers and brothers who tried to stop them.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“I am almost dizzied by a sudden knowledge, as cold as snow down my spine; that I, too, will grow up one day like everyone else, and look back and miss the years gone by, and the things I could have done, should have done. And growing up is suddenly not something to be impatient for, not all jam and buns and doing as one pleases. It is precisely the opposite.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“Sometimes I think Pa hates it because the things I remember are nt for me to be forgiven, but for him. And he can't forget or forgive himeself. That's why he never sleeps, and why he drinks so much. He told me once that there are no memories at the bottom of a glass.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“Memories are important, like the bones of the mind. We build ourselves upon them, flesh and blood moulded around the pictures of what is past.”
― Paul Kearney

“The English are a great race,’ he told me once. ‘But they have a deep down belief that they are the best of all peoples.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“It must be terrible to be old, when you love someone who died young. They never change in your mind, and every day you see yourself grow away from that person you were when you loved and knew them. Until you are more of a shadow than they are, and the girl you were is altogether gone, more dead even than the young man on the battlefield.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“That is the problem with being twelve. All the grown-ups think they have a right to know your business.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“I bet if big fat Henry hadn't been king, he wouldn't have had so many wives. He was a wicked man, but sad too, I suppose. How awful, to never find someone you could truly love, so you are always looking for her your whole life. And cutting people's heads off when they turn out to be the wrong one.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“There are men in frock coats and top hats with the blood of the world on their hands, and they eat with silver forks and white napkins every day, and they will give up their last breath in a linen-made bed whilst the ones they sent out to die lie forgotten in the earth, mouldering bones with the poppies fat and red above ’em. Ah, mankind.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“You’ll be in the dark.’ ‘Bless you, girl, I got no fear of the dark.’ Of course he hasn’t. Because he is the fear in the dark, the monster under the bed. Luca is a thing out of stories, and he is here in my house wearing my coat. If that is not an adventure then I do not know what is.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“There is a way of looking at things when you are alone in the woods at night. You see more clearly the things at the corner of the eye, and hear all the little crackling noises, the saw of your own breath, even the thumping of your heart. All so clear. It is as though on stepping out of the city an older part of the brain starts to work again. The part that remembers flint and bone and ice.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“I have seen worse things than ghosts, and if one were to appear to me, I should have so many questions to ask of it that it would have no time to groan and moan and shake its chains.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“It must be terrible to be old, when you love someone who died young. They never change in your mind, and every day you see yourself grow away from that person you were when you loved and knew them. Until”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“PEOPLE TALK ABOUT being in the doghouse after they have misbehaved. I have never understood why that should be such a bad thing. I love dogs, and would have no trouble at all cuddling up next to one in some little kennel. We could look out at the world side by side, and people would leave us alone. It would be a fine thing altogether.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“What do they be teaching the young these days? I declare, they think more on machines and formulas than they do on the true knowledge of the world. They blow things up, and call it progress. They kills one another by the million, and calls it civilization... But you takes a single life, just one, and that is murder most foul, and they will pin you for that, and lay it against you the rest of your life. It hardly seems fair.”
― Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic

“This land does not go out of its way to provide happy endings”
― Paul Kearney, A Different Kingdom

“Who is to say where you are?’ Mirkady asked lightly. ‘Some say there is a different world for every story ever told or untold, that there is no such thing as the here and now, only the unfolding of infinite possibilities, all of them real in some place or other.’ ‘In which case,’ Dwarmo said, vastly amused, ‘there is no such thing as a mistake.”
― Paul Kearney, A Different Kingdom