Dimitra > Dimitra's Quotes

“But now he came up to himself slowly again—it was like rising through heavy water—and he was warmed by one of the great consolations: nothing very terrible lasts for very long.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“I suppose one of the reasons we’re all able to continue to exist for our allotted span in this green and blue vale of tears is that there is always, however remote it might seem, the possibility of change.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“..Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to imagine. ”
― Colm Tóibín

“We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Before forty, you think that exhaustion is something like a long-lasting hangover. But at forty you learn all about it. Even your passions exhaust you.”
― Kevin Barry

“There is a stab of awareness at the beginning and at the end of love, and the feeling precisely replicates – it’s a twinge of cold certainty at either end of the affair, and it is twice terrifying.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“Marriage, Charlie says. Beautiful and cruel.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“I felt like a newly laid egg, all swishy and gloopy inside, and so fragile that the slightest pressure could break me.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. We can do things other characters can't, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“I pondered what else I should take for him. Flowers seemed wrong; they're a love token, after all. I looked in the fridge, and popped a packet of cheese slices into the bag. All men like cheese.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Cause of Death: the west of Ireland.”
― Kevin Barry, That Old Country Music

“But now, in Donegal, in the clear light of summer, I was somehow making amends with myself.”
― Kevin Barry, That Old Country Music

“The Canavans - they had for decades and centuries brought to the Ox elements that were by turn very complicated and very simple: occult nous and racy semen.”
― Kevin Barry, That Old Country Music