Andrew O'Hagan > Quotes

“They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.”
― Andrew O'Hagan

“The thing we know is that humanity has a hundred per cent mortality rate. We all die. But the facts don’t matter – we can’t bear to lose the people we love, and it doesn’t quite register about the billions who die, or even about our own coming deaths. We don’t experience our own death the way we experience the deaths of those we love.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“The water was cold but it soon warms up when the boys are made of sunshine.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“But she was half in love with chaos... With all her yearning for the ordinary life, she was born to admire outsiders. You could see she felt enlarged by drama and trouble, by the electric pulse of things going wrong, and her vision of the easy life remained in most ways a recurring dream.”
― Andrew O'Hagan

“Don’t look back. Go to the car and don’t look back.”
“Looking back is all I’ve got,” he said.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“Being young is a kind of warfare in which the great enemy is experience.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“If being young is a crime scene,” I said, “the evidence from that night is everywhere.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“Be near me when my light is low and be near me when my heart is sick...”
― Andrew O'Hagan

“...it was magic to feel you had things to say and people to say them to, and a gentle fog of contentment filled the bar...”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“The past isn't really the past," Tully said. "It's just music, books, and films.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“You are a human being. And that's and unstable condition that ends badly for all of us.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“It wasn’t a matter to fight over: some families are made up of strangers and nothing can change it.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“It was like a veil had fallen, and all his carnal energy and all his native certainty – everything strong in him – was now devoted to the matter of his own destruction.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“I had once asked him if he felt happy hiding in the internet and he said yes, it was his home. On a good day it is the bright field that contains all souls but on a bad day it is the final darkness, where misery is gapingly exposed.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, The Secret Life: Three True Stories

“The summer remembers nothing of the winter and nature is a kind of amnesia.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, The Illuminations: A Novel

“Go gently with people's pain. It's the same as yours.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“He was a friend to friendship itself and never expected people to be better than they were.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“MEMORY IS A KIND of friendship, a friendship with the more necessary parts of oneself. How often do we reach for the past’s genial knowledge to meet the unknowables of the present, asking once again that the anterior world might blossom into life and colour the current day? In this at least I cannot be alone.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Be Near Me

“Reality's got a lot to answer for”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“They were just boys, and the romance of it all lay in knowing they'd seen the sun together.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“We participate in the systems that oppress people, we thrive on them, and we think that by going on festive marches and tweeting slogans to our like-minded friends we are somehow cleansed. Welcome to the orgy of white contrition.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Caledonian Road

“The traditional Scots method of dealing with a person in crisis is first to make them feel worse and then to help them.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“They never got bored with each other, he felt, because they never assumed the other wasn’t an individual.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Caledonian Road

“What we had that day was our story. We didn’t have the other bit, the future, and we had no way of knowing what that would be like. Perhaps it would change our memory of all this, or perhaps it would draw from it, nobody knew. But I’m sure I felt the story of that hall and how we reached it would never vanish.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies

“The colour red doesn’t actually exist,’ she said. ‘It only exists as an idea in your head. Always remember that. You create it yourself when your imagination meets the light.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, The Illuminations: A Novel

“He mustn’t overreact to their hatred of small talk and of white men who think they rule the world. But being right, to them, was like having a passport, Campbell said to himself. You can’t get anywhere without it. Unless you’re right, you don’t belong anywhere and all borders are closed.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Caledonian Road

“He knew nothing about policy and taxes or what makes a people, and now, God help him, he was like those kids who think their country is Google. ‘You’re just not going deep enough,’ Luke said. ‘Money has imploded. Religion has gone mad. Privacy is disappearing. The ice-cap is melting and children are starving to death. And you want to sing an old song about national togetherness.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, The Illuminations

“You’re just America-on-ice.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, The Illuminations

“Among the people I recognised from our past, many of their faces were much the same and others were completely blurred by life, as if time was wiping them.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies