Donal Ryan > Quotes

“People are better inside in your head. When you're longing for them, they're perfect.”
― Donal Ryan, The Thing About December

“I wish to God I could talk to her the way she wants me to, besides forever making her guess what I’m thinking. Why can’t I find the words?”
― Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart

“There's no man on this earth can even be assured he'll have a next day.”
― Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart

“That's the thing about December: it goes by you in a flash. If you just close your eyes, it's gone. And it's like you were never there.”
― Donal Ryan, The Thing About December

“All talk is lies in a way. Only the doing of a thing can make it true.”
― Donal Ryan, The Thing About December

“It was from the experience of blackening that boy that I learned an important and valuable lesson: if you say something enough times, the repetition of it makes it true. Any notion you like, no matter how mad it seems, can be a fact’s chrysalis. Once you say it loud enough and often enough it becomes debatable. Debates change minds. Debate is the larval stage of truth. Constant, unflagging, loud repetition completes your notion’s metamorphosis into fact. The fact takes wing and flutters from place to place and mind to mind and makes a living, permanent thing of itself.”
― Donal Ryan, From a Low and Quiet Sea

“and wasn't it an awful dangerous thing, a text message, because once you pressed that little send button, that was it. Like pulling a trigger of a shotgun and sending a pellet into a little rabbit's brain as he sniffed the sweet spring air. You couldn't undo it. You couldn't ever take it back.”
― Donal Ryan, The Thing About December

“if you observe a man closely and properly you’ll eventually come to know the shade of his soul. No soul is brilliant white, save for the souls of infants. But there are men alive who will do evil without pause, who are without mercy, and there are men alive who would rather die than harm another, and all of the rest of us fall somewhere in between.”
― Donal Ryan, From a Low and Quiet Sea

“Drunk, he was leering and silent and mostly asleep. Sober, he was a watcher, a horror of a man who missed nothing and commented on everything. Nothing was ever done right or cooked right or handed to him properly or ironed straight or finished off fully with him.”
― Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart

“How would I know what Jesus would have done? That fella was a mass of contradictions as far as I can see. One minute he says to turn the other cheek, the next minute he's having a big strop and kicking over lads' market stalls. He says blessed are the meek and he goes around shouting and roaring the odds to everyone. He rises from the dead and then shags off a few weeks later and leaves his buddies in the shit.”
― donal ryan, The Spinning Heart

“What’s in the past can’t be changed and what’s to come can’t be known and you can’t give your life to worrying. Sure you can’t. All you have to do is be kind and you’ll have lived a good life.”
― Donal Ryan, From a Low and Quiet Sea

“Bernadette never went to Mass; she was a fundamentalist Christian. Mother often said she only used religion as a framework for her craziness. She could just as easily have been a Muslim or a Buddhist or a white witch.”
― Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart

“Even so, a lie in print looks truer than the truth sounds from the mouth of a fool.”
― Donal Ryan, The Thing About December

“The universe makes and remakes itself in each moment. I feel those other lives sometimes, going on around me.”
― Donal Ryan, All We Shall Know

“I took to numbers, their definiteness, their unyielding natures: even when you chop a number down to a half or a tenth or a millionth or a billionth part of its former self it still exists, it’s still whole and pristine and incorruptible. When everything else is gone, when the universe has collapsed back in on itself and time itself has stopped, there’ll still be numbers, frozen in the singularity, waiting for existence to push itself into being again, so they can put order on the great expansion, and tell it when it’s reached its terminal mass, its ineluctable point of return to its beginning.”
― Donal Ryan, From a Low and Quiet Sea

“Sure wasn't I at least the author of my own tale? And if you can say that as you depart this world, you can say a lot.”
― Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart

“They loved him, or loved the thought of him, what they thought he was: a man who could easily have had a good life who chose instead their life: spite and bitterness and age-fogged glasses of watery whiskey in dark, cobwebbed country bars, shit-smeared toilets, blood-streaked piss, and early death. He could have helped it but didn't. They couldn't help it and loved him for being worse than them. He was the king of the wasters.”
― Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart

“That's the way of things, sometimes, my father said. Things happen inside a person that they think they have no control over, and it turns out they do, but they need to be told by someone else.”
― Donal Ryan, All We Shall Know

“And once a thing enters a person’s mind, it’s always there, like woodworm in the leg of a chair, like cells of cancer, like rats in the cavities of the earth; it can’t ever be fully eradicated. Even things long forgotten remain in the dark infinity of the mind; there’s no unlearning. What’s said can’t be unsaid. And no law in this universe is immutable.”
― Donal Ryan, From a Low and Quiet Sea

“Is this how you know you’re in love? This absence of pretence?”
― Donal Ryan, Strange Flowers

“There's no going back for man or God or any creature that ever lived. We can only go back in our minds and even then we're going back to something that doesn't exist. So we can forget changing the past and all we can do is look after our present moment, planting good seeds in it so that our next moments might be fruitful.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“Fiction serves a noble purpose, to oust secrecy, to obliterate shame, to use narrative as a blessed valve to relieve the awful pressure of the pent-up, unspoken pain of existence”
― Donal Ryan

“Nana didn’t say much, just a few judicious wisecracks. Hmm. You’ll have to either get a smaller arse or a bigger skirt, Eileen.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“Our bodies know they’re getting old but sometimes our hearts have to be reminded.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“It wasn't until Daddy was buried, when the house was at last empty of people who came full of condolences and left full of sandwiches, apple tart, tea and drink that Mother at last came to a dead stop.”
― Donal Ryan

“The future is a cold mistress. You can give all your life looking to her and trying to catch hold of her but she'll always dance away from your fingertips and laugh back at you from the distance. Them that say they know are liars and thieves.”
― Donal Ryan

“Loneliness covers the earth like a blanket. It flows in the stream down through the Callows to the lake. It's in the muck in the yard and the briars in the haggard and the empty outbuildings are bursting with it. It runs down the walls inside of the house like tears and grows on the walls outside like a poisonous choking weed. It's in the sky and the stones and the clouds and the grass. The air is thick with it: you breath it into your lungs and you feel like it might suffocate you. It runs into hollow places like rainwater. It settles on the grass and on trees and takes their shapes and all the earth is wet with it. It has a smell, like the inside of a saucepan: scrapped metal, cold and sharp. When it hits you, it feels like a rap of a hurl across your knuckles on a frosty winter's morning. in PE: sharp, shocking pain, but inside you, so it can't be seen and no one says sorry for causing it nor asks are you ok, and no kind teacher wants to look at it and tut-tut and tell you you'll be grand, good lad. But you know if another man stood where you're standing and looked at the same things he wouldn't see it or feel it.”
― Donal Ryan

“Sometimes I look at Daddy, at his side or his back or his face, and I love him so much that it feels like he’s a prize I won for doing something brilliant, better than anyone else.”
― Donal Ryan, A Slanting of the Sun

“That time is long gone. But aren't we still the same people?”
― Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart

“Some people stay married for lifetimes, decade after decade, great skelps of centuries together until they're almost in the same skin, growing into each other, shrinking to each other's sizes and shapes, speaking with one voice, clinging fast together, dying days or hours apart. Love doesn't come into it. Not the love of cartoon hearts and cards and cakes and movies and ads for things that no one needs; that grisly synthetic thing, that smiling dog. Love is just a word used to explain away the impossibility of this co-existence, the glorious achievement of being together in the same place, of being happy, and peaceful, and calm, and meeting up again at Heaven's gate, and walking hand in hand to the eternal light. Fairy stories. Couples in care homes curled together in fear of being alone, of being left in darkness and silence, listening for the step of a stranger, too afraid even to use the commode. This happens, people are left like this. It's better this way, to have smashed it all to bits while we're still to separate people.”
― Donal Ryan, All We Shall Know