Donal Ryan Quotes

#1. why can't I just want to be me?

Donal Ryan

#2. 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

#3. Some things is easy do, when you have no choice in the world but to do them. Like shiteing into bedpan, in front of a nurse.

Donal Ryan

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. I kind of thought actually that Trevor was gone completely mental when he called up here a few weeks ago. Like, why would he not text or email or Facebook? What's with all the reality, I thought. Does he not know he's a million times cooler in virtual form?

Donal Ryan

#8. 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

#9. All talk is lies in a way. Only the doing of a thing can make it true.

Donal Ryan

#10. The ways of some things are set, like the courses of rivers or the greenness of grass, or the trouble that follows my daddy, or the hard light of knowing in people's eyes.

Donal Ryan

#11. 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

#12. That time is long gone. But aren't we still the same people?

Donal Ryan

#13. 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

#14. People are better inside in your head. When you're longing for them, they're perfect.

Donal Ryan

#15. Even so, a lie in print looks truer than the truth sounds from the mouth of a fool.

Donal Ryan

#16. 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

#17. There's no man on this earth can even be assured he'll have a next day.

Donal Ryan

#18. 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