Paul Lynch > Quotes

“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, that 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

“We are both scientists, Eilish, we belong to a tradition but tradition is nothing more than what everyone can agree on – the scientists, the teachers, the institutions, 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 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

“after a certain age a man grows a beard not to enter manhood but to put a barrier to his youth,”
― 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,”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“words, there are no words now for what she wants to say and she looks towards the sky seeing only darkness knowing she has been at one with this darkness and that to stay would be to remain in this dark when she wants for them to live, and she touches her son’s head and she takes Molly’s hands and squeezes them as though saying she will never let go, and she says, to the sea, we must go to the sea, the sea is life.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“Sooner or later, of course, reality reveals itself, he says, you can borrow for a time against reality but reality is always waiting, patiently, silently, to exact a price and level the scales——”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“We were offered visas, you know, to Australia, and we turned them down, my husband said no, plain and simple, he said it was impossible to go at the time and I suppose he was right, and how could he have known anyhow, how could any of us have known what was going to happen, I suppose other people seemed to know, but I never understood how they were so certain, what I mean is, you could never have imagined it, not in a million years, all that was to happen, and I could never understand those that left, how they could just leave like that, leave everything behind, all that life, all that living, it was absolutely impossible for us to do so at the time and the more I look at it the more it seems there was nothing we could do anyhow, what I mean is, there was never any real room for action, that time with the visas, how were we supposed to go when we had so many commitments, so many responsibilities, and when things got worse there was just no room for manoeuvre, I think what I’m trying to say is that I used to believe in free will, if you had asked me before all this I would have told you I was free as a bird, but now I’m not so sure, now, I don’t see how free will is possible when you are caught up within such a monstrosity, one thing leads to another thing until the damn thing has its own momentum and there is nothing you can do, I can see now that what I thought of as freedom was really just struggle and that there was no freedom all along, but look, she says, taking Ben by the hand and dancing him, we are here now aren’t we and so many other people are gone, we’re the lucky ones seeking a better life, there is only looking forward now, isn’t that”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“This place called heaven, this realm of perfection and life everlasting. When it comes down to it, nobody ever wants to go there. Now isn’t that strange? I’ll tell you what I’ve seen. I’ve seen faith fall apart at the moment of death. I’ve seen people fight it in every way how. I’ve seen the terror in their eyes. The scratching, the squirming. If god is life ever after then why is it nobody ever wants to go to him and meet him?”
― Paul Lynch, Red Sky in Morning

“Daylight tricks you into thinking what you see is truth, lets you go through life thinking you know everything. But the truth is we are sleepwalkers. We walk through the night that is chaos and dark and forever keeps its truth to itself.”
― Paul Lynch, Grace

“Soon he will walk and then he will run and the hand that pulls on the hand of the mother is the hand that will pull to let go.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“I don’t sleep much at all, she says, I dream each night of a soundless sleep but that is impossible now, it took me some time before I understood that I was already asleep in a manner, you know, that I was sleeping all the time I thought I was awake, trying to see into the problem that stood before me like a great darkness, this silence consuming every moment of my life, I thought I’d go mad looking into it but then I awoke and began to see what they were doing to us, the brilliance of the act, they take something from you and replace it with silence and you’re confronted by that silence every waking moment and cannot live, you cease to be yourself and become a thing before this silence, a thing waiting for the silence to end, a thing on your knees begging and whispering to it all night and day, a thing waiting for what was taken to be returned and only then can you resume your life, 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

“They are calling it an insurgency on the international news, Molly says, but if you want to give war its proper name, call it entertainment, we are now TV for the rest of the world.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“I spend a lot of time on my own thinking betwixt me and the saddle and I ain’t come up with much but I did come up with this—the difference between man and beast is we’re able to imagine the future and they’re not. But what makes us no better than em is we cain’t predict it.”
― Paul Lynch, Red Sky in Morning

“What hides in plain sight is the inexplicable. It is an absence that is always present. ”
― Paul Lynch

“In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times. Bertolt Brecht”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“Literature is about contemplation not speed-reading for plot or fact. I try to give the reader what I call the startling moment—to take them down to the heartbeat of a character. To open the moment out in all its richness.”
― Paul Lynch

“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

“I ask myself if I have got close enough to what I am writing about. Often, I find the closer you get, the more texture you are going to end up with. That for sure will slow a reader down. And great if it does.”
― Paul Lynch

“It is then she is met with the realisation she cannot remember how he used to look, cell renewal is both fast and slow, you start out with one body and over time it becomes another, he is the same and yet he is different, only the eyes remain unchanged.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“The cherry trees held the sleet this morning when she awoke but now the trees in their witless conspiracy are nodding to the dark.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“Sooner or later, of course, reality reveals itself, he says, you can borrow for a time against reality but reality is always waiting, patiently, silently, to exact a price and level the scales—”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“The sea in the distance opening a doorway. Familiar faces turning in half-light and sounds of speech and the way that each body moves uniquely in memory, each memory rising in its own kinked light that is seen briefly but not held, each memory breaking like surf one wave over the other leaving a wash of emptiness.”
― Paul Lynch, Grace

“Freedom is your soul in the emptiness of night. Freedom is this dark that is as great as what it holds the stars and everything beneath it and yet how it seems to be nothing, has no beginning, no end, and no center.”
― Paul Lynch, Grace

“It is not that she has forgotten him, it is that when she thinks of him now so little remains, he has become a shadow, an absence in the place where love used to be, or perhaps some small love remains in a chamber of the heart sealed under so much weight.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“I do think you must always write for the ideal reader. But it would be folly to worry too much about who exactly that is.”
― Paul Lynch

“I certainly do not fear for the life of literature. There will always be people born wired for books. Every age has its contemplatives.”
― Paul Lynch

“This tremble in her right hand as though something has burrowed under the skin to live off sinew and bone,”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“it is up to the state to decide what it believes or does not believe according to its needs,”
― 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

“A book often begins with a vision, something half-seen that needs to be explored.”
― Paul Lynch