They’re like those First World War airmen, the finest ones, shining in their recklessness and invincible, who got home and found that home had no place for what they were.
Smoked like it was fuel and he was going to get every last inch to the gallon.
What-if-maybe crap is for weak people. It belongs to the ones who don’t have the strength to make actual situations go their way, so they have to hide away in daydreams where they can play at controlling what comes next. And that makes them even weaker.
If a guy’s whole head is in reality, then reality is the only route we can take to get to him. If he’s letting his mind prance off down dozens of twisty hypothetical fairy tales, every one of those is a crack we can use to prize him open.
You can’t take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall. That’s nothing more than instinct, falling back on what you know best. I think I stayed because running seemed too strange and too complicated. All I knew was how to fall back, find a patch of solid ground, and then dig my heels in and fight to start over.
Frightened people are obedient–not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally.
But if you’ve seen a dead body, you know how they change the air: that huge silence, the absence strong as a black hole, time stopped and molecules frozen around the still thing that’s learned the final secret, the one he can never tell.
This country’s passion for property is built into the blood, a current as huge and primal as desire. Centuries of being turned out on the roadside at a landlord’s whim, helpless, teach your bones that everything in life hangs on owning your home.
I’ve always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you’re over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming.
Irish politics are tribal, incestuous, tangled and furtive, incomprehensible even to many of the people involved.
Some people should never meet. The fallout spreads too wide and gets into the ground for much too long.
That’s how guys work. If you care more about them than they do about you, they hate you for it.” Julia.
For ten years Dublin’s been changing faster than our minds can handle. The economic boom has given us too many people with helicopters and too many crushed into cockroachy flats from hell, way too many loathing their lives in fluorescent cubicles, enduring for the weekend and then starting all over again, and we’re fracturing under the weight of it.
In all your life, only a few moments matter. Mostly you never get a good look at them except in hindsight, long after they’ve zipped past you:.
If you want to kill someone, have enough respect for my time to make it someone, anyone, other than the most gobsmackingly obvious person in the world. One.
It’s taken me this long to start thinking about what luck can be, how smoothly and deliciously deceptive, how relentlessly twisted and knotted in on its own hidden places, and how lethal.
I had forgotten even how to want something slow, something soft, something with wide spaces and its own sure-footed swaying rhythms.
The air of the squad room hurt everywhere it touched me. Lexie in dim gold light on the screen was a dark lake I could high-dive into, she was a thin-ice river I could skate away on, she was a long-distance flight leaving now.
I’ve been trying not to say it out loud because I don’t want to jinx it. Like a dumb kid; like one of those moaners who believe the universe has it in for them and everything is just looking for an excuse to turn to shite.
The impulse to win is a valuable thing, right up until you let it make you into a loser.