Rob Doyle > Quotes

“We get tattoos in the same spirit in which we write books. The crucial thing in both cases is to do it while you still have the nerve to say what’s true before it gets overlaid by other truths. Write books full of insight you know will vanish, that you know you’ll come to regret voicing even, before you become someone else, someone mellower or happier, more compromised or timid, someone who can no longer withstand the truths you have it in you now to express. Even if you eventually regard such truths as dangerous mistakes, they’ll have been your stepping stones to the knowledge of the future. Books and tattoo must be records of disappearing ideals.”
― Rob Doyle, Autobibliography

“All in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold

“I could live this way indefinitely and I'd be all right ... I've done enough living and can now spend my time holding up the memories for contemplation, determining what it all meant. Images flood in: cities I've passed through; rooms where I've slept; friends who put me up or put up with me. In a couple of years I'll turn forty. Schopenhauer wrote that the first forty years are the text, the rest is the commentary. I see that, and yet I feel that I'm somehow at the start of a life, on the cusp, facing a future that's strange and turbulent but not entirely hopeless.”
― Rob Doyle, Autobibliography

“Time rushes past. We become swept up in life’s tumult. Years go by, full of drama and event. We roam the world. And then, during moments of calm, we see that time hasn’t really gone anywhere, just as we ourselves are right where we were ten years earlier, though our skin is tougher and lines are etched in our faces.”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold

“One of the less remarked-upon barbarities of the five-day working week is how it imposes on the weekend a manic, anxiety-ridden quality: workers are so desperate to enjoy themselves that they can only fail to do so; they run around like convicts on day release, finally drinking themselves into a stupor because at least alcohol makes it seem that time is not passing, it is present, that we are not elsewhere, we are here and now. The worker's grim determination to enjoy his two days off has the effect of ruining those two days, filling them with worry and the bitter knowledge that soon it will be Monday again, and he will spend five dreary shifts anticipating the next weekend, which, like all the others, will be a disappointment.”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold

“Buddhism offered a blueprint for living that was not moralistic but rational – Buddhists rarely spoke of good or evil, only of skilful or unskilful actions. It did not require the abdication of reason but rather reason’s”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold

“It is difficult, when we look back on certain periods of our lives, not to succumb to romanticism and nostalgia. Even while I lived in London, though, I romanticised the city and the life I lived there; or rather, I knew it was a beautiful, romantic time of life, and that, like youth itself, the circumstances that had come so magically together would never be repeated, and that one day I would regret those years. Although I sometimes tantalise myself with the idea of moving to London again, I don't need Heraclitus to remind me that you can't step into the same city twice. The London where I lived no longer exists, any more than a dream exists upon awakening - a dream in which you were happy, in which life lived up to its promise.”
― Rob Doyle, Autobibliography

“This was why I loved clubs in Berlin, why dancing had become as needful to me as reading or laughing: the ease of access to a state of unselfconsciousness. There was always someone older or younger, nakeder or weirder than you, and the fact that photography was forbidden and there were no mirrors anywhere reinforced the ethos of participation over gawking, immersion over separation. In the crowd you lost any distinction between dancing and being danced, broke clear of selfhood right at the point where the self became exalted and sovereign.
This did not feel like decadence — this was political. These men and women would go back out to the world empowered and awake.”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold

“I wouldn’t work even if they paid me for it. Never get out of bed for less than ye got into it for, that’s my way of lookin at it. There’s a hundred solid reasons not to work. The big one for me is that it distracts me from me poetry.’
‘Ye write poetry?’
‘Of course I do. If this wasn’t such a cretinized culture, all real men would be writin poetry. It used to be a sign of manliness – and now they’d have ye think it’s effeminate! Can ye believe that, how far we’ve fuckin regressed?”
― Rob Doyle, Here Are the Young Men

“Each of us, perhaps, holds the idea of such a place, the one we long to see more than anywhere else - and for this reason we should avoid ever going there. It thus remains a zone of desire and enigma, a space on the map onto which we project our capacity for enchantment.”
― Rob Doyle, Autobibliography

“It had turned into a sunny day, a brief opening in the grey cloud-wall that had hidden the sky for months. There were a lot of people making the most of it before the sky-blue was swallowed up again. Pasty parents laid out mats and kept an anxious eye on their children, who waded into the sea like a generation of suicides. Every father, no matter how young, seemed to have a beer belly, and all the mothers had flabby, cellulite-lined legs. The men stripped off their GAA or English football jerseys. The women wore bathing suits of pink or idiot-yellow. In the hazy sunlit drunkenness I felt deflated by the scene.
‘All the happy families,’ said Cocker as we spread out a blanket and sat down.”
― Rob Doyle, Here Are the Young Men

“Such troughs of fatigue, a factor in my life for as long as I could remember, seemed to be growing deeper and more frequent as I got older. I was hardly into my thirties but already I felt the diminishment of vitality associated with middle age - in fact, I had always felt it, even when I was twenty-one, or seventeen. Perhaps I was born middle-aged, I thought. I wondered, not for the first time, whether I suffered from an undiagnosed case of chronic fatigue syndrome - or whether, more simply, I was a lazy bastard.”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold

“By drifting from city to city, I could maintain the appearance of motion,” he admits, “when in truth I was going nowhere.”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold

“Ye see, drink pulls ye back into yer body. It anchors ye in yer physical experience, whereas marijuana on the other hand makes ye float further out into the cosmic realms, the non-visible reality. ... The fuckin spirit world. And that, ladies, is why the Irishman drinks so much: cos he’s already far enough out in the other world, due to his inborn Irish nature. He doesn’t need something to take him out there to the fairies and the spirits and the bleedin demons. He’s already there, so the oul grog helps to keep him grounded, it doesn’t let him drift too far out. The drink is better for the Irishman than the weed.”
― Rob Doyle, Here Are the Young Men

“The sun cheerfully mounted the morning sky and we lay about, off our heads and laughing in the sunshine like it was all a big fucking Coke ad.”
― Rob Doyle, Here Are the Young Men

“Crime in London no longer has any motive, I told myself, peering at the skyline through my binoculars. Hooded youths will emerge from the shadows and plunge a knife into your groin, or shatter your bones with iron bars, or beat you to a coma in a park at night, raping your every orifice, all for no reason whatsoever. This new breed of London thug takes pride in its absence of motive, I reflected; motive is shame to the contemporary London thug, a creature whose thirst for cruelty is without limit.”
― Rob Doyle, This is the Ritual

“He’s just the only relevant director, the only one. Every other film ye see is just totally obsolete, just completely dishonest. The thing with Tarantino is that he doesn’t pretend there’s a real world out there for his films to show us – there are only more films. And the “real world” is only a copy of films – Tarantino knows this. Ah, he’s just amazin. But all these other directors, they keep tryin to make films about “real” people – as if they still exist! They just don’t get it. I mean, like, ye see a guy in a film, and he’s sittin in a doorway down some alley, wearin a dark coat and drinkin whiskey from a hip flask. And we’re supposed to believe that what ye see is what ye get, and this character is doin all this in a natural way, and he’s not even aware of the glamour of it, of how much it reminds ye of, like, fifty other films. Whereas in “real life” the camera is always on you. You’re always in a film.’
‘That’s the point of Tarantino – he’s after givin up on reality. He knows that it disappeared back in the forties or whenever. He doesn’t pretend we’re still livin in that time when people had, like, emotional journeys and dramatic conflicts and, ye know, moral dilemmas. He’s cut the crap.”
― Rob Doyle, Here Are the Young Men

“Despite Russia’s luminous literary past, the modern Russian hates and abhors books. There is only one thing that the modern Russian hates and abhors more than he hates and abhors books, and that is the people who read them. Russia’s luminous literary past, as far as the modern Russian is concerned, belongs in the past.”
― Rob Doyle, This is the Ritual

“It is said that any populace is only three missed meals away from revolution, but not enough has been made of the insurrectionary potential of a water supply that unexpectedly dries up.”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold