Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we’ve been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.
Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.
Being easily freaked out comes with its own special skill set: you develop subtle tricks to work around it, make sure people don’t notice. Pretty soon, if you’re a fast learner, you can get through the day looking almost exactly like a normal human being.
There was a time when I believed I was the redeemed one, the boy borne safely home on the ebb of whatever freak tide carried Peter and Jamie away. Not any more. In ways too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never left that wood.
My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind.
What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this – two things: I crave truth. And I lie.
I can’t explain the alchemy that transmuted one evening into the equivalent of years held lightly in common. The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency.
Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.
I wasn’t sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head.
Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.
But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.
People you knew when you were teenagers, the ones who saw your stupidest haircut and the most embarrassing things you’ve done in your life, and they still cared about you after all that: they’re not replaceable, you know?
We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.
Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who’ve been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you’re not looking, without you adding to the drama.
I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.
Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they’d be different.
My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.
Take what you want and pay for it, says God. You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and you will have to pay it.
Most people are only too delighted to wreck each other’s heads. And for the tiny minority who do their pathetic best not to, this world is going to go right ahead and make sure they do it anyway.
If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that’s fine; you only need to get it right once.
Sometimes, when you’re close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can’t.