Just don’t ever tell yourself that you didn’t know... That would be the worst crime of all.
It was a difficult time to be Irish, a difficult time to be twenty-one years of age and a difficult time to be a man who was attracted to other men. To be all three simultaneously required a level of subterfuge and guile that felt contrary to my nature.
I’ve spent so much time pushing the boat out that I forgot to jump on and now it’s out beyond the harbour on the high seas, but it’s very nice to look at.
You’ve heard the wonderful news, I presume?” “No. Has Mr. Trump died?
Would there be no end to publishing, he wondered? Perhaps it would be a good idea if everyone just stopped writing for a couple of years, and allowed readers to catch up.
Some things are just sitting there, waiting to be discovered. Other things are probably better off left alone.
I have always been a lover of the sun, even if, through spending a lifetime in Ireland, I have had little personal connection with it.
He knew that sometimes people who were sad didn’t want to be asked about it; sometimes they’d offer the information themselves and sometimes they wouldn’t stop talking about it for months on end, but on this occasion Bruno thought that he should wait before saying anything.
I was deluding myself, for love was one thing but desire was something else entirely.
For the first time in my life, I started to think about my own mortality. Should I fall or have a heart attack, I could lie on the kitchen floor decomposing for weeks before anyone thought to come looking for me. I didn’t even have a cat to eat me.
Of course all this happened a long time ago. And nothing like that could happen again, not in this day and age.
I had never considered myself to be a dishonest person, hating the idea that I was capable of such mendacity and deceit, but the more I examined the architecture of my life, the more I realized how fraudulent were its foundations. The belief that I would spend the rest of my time on earth lying to people weighed heavily on me and at such times I gave serious consideration to taking my own life.
He had never felt so ashamed in his life; he had never imagined that he could behave so cruelly. He wondered how a boy who thought he was a good person really could act in such a cowardly way towards a friend.
He’s crazy,” Bruno said, twirling a finger in circles around the side of his head and whistling to indicate just how crazy he thought he was. “He went up to a cat on the street the other day and invited her over for afternoon tea.” “What did the cat say?” asked Gretel, who was making a sandwich in the corner of the kitchen. “Nothing.” explained Bruno. “It was a cat.
The notion that he had a life outside our life, outside our friendship, was deeply hurtful to me.
From the introduction “After all, the great joy of literature, as opposed to politics or religion, is that it embraces differing opinions, it encourages debate, it allows us to have heated conversations with our closes friends and dearest loved ones. And through it all, no one gets hurt, no one gets taken away from their homes, and no one gets killed.
Father laughed, which upset Bruno even more; there was nothing that made him more angry than when a grown-up laughed at him for not knowing something, especially when he was trying to find out the answer by asking questions.
How can something still feel so painful after twenty-eight years, I asked myself. Is there no recovery from the traumas of our youth?
A home is not a building or a street or a city or something so artificial as bricks and mortar. A home is where one’s family is...
You know, Emily Dickinson is here too. All she does is write poems about life all the time. The irony! She keeps asking me to read them. I refuse, of course. The days are long enough as it is.