760 ratings (3.52 avg)
587 reviews
more photos (3)

#33 most followed
#6 best reviewers
#99 top reviewers

Peter Boyle

https://www.goodreads.com/petes_sake

Peter’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (18)
currently-reading‎ (0)
read‎ (762)
did-not-finish‎ (0)
irish‎ (82)
non-fiction‎ (76)
booker-nominee‎ (47)
short-stories‎ (44)

music‎ (38)
favourites‎ (30)
womens-prize-nominee‎ (30)
historical-fiction‎ (23)
crime‎ (16)
memoir‎ (14)
booker-winners‎ (12)
pulitzer-winner‎ (10)

best-reads-2014‎ (7)
comedy‎ (7)
africa‎ (6)
best-reads-2020‎ (6)
best-reads-2015‎ (5)
best-reads-2018‎ (5)
womens-prize-winners‎ (5)
best-reads-2013‎ (4)

best-reads-2016‎ (4)
best-reads-2017‎ (4)
best-reads-2019‎ (4)
speculative-fiction‎ (4)
goldsmiths-nominee‎ (3)
nature‎ (3)
thriller‎ (2)

Stats | More…

“And there was nothing left for me to do, but go.
Though the things of the world were strong with me still.
Such as, for example: a gaggle of children trudging through a side-blown December flurry; a friendly match-share beneath some collision-tilted streetlight; a frozen clock, bird-visited within its high tower; cold water from a tin jug; toweling off one’s clinging shirt post–June rain.
Pearls, rags, buttons, rug-tuft, beer-froth.
Someone’s kind wishes for you; someone remembering to write; someone noticing that you are not at all at ease.”
― George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

tags: beauty

20 likes

“The more she laughs, the more he ups the ante with his clowning. By the time he finishes he will have run through all the secret mysteries of laughter that human beings have ever understood, mobilizing everything at his disposal. There is no way for him to know how guilty it makes his mother feel, seeing such a young child go to such lengths just to wring a bit of apparent happiness from her, or that her laughter will all eventually run out.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

tags: despair, guilt, innocence

4 likes

“Only then (nearly out the door, so to speak) did I realize how unspeakably beautiful all of this was, how precisely engineered for our pleasure, and saw that I was on the brink of squandering a wondrous gift, the gift of being allowed, every day, to wander this vast sensual paradise, this grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing.”
― George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

96 likes

“This was the part she hated, the part of a relationship that always nudged her to bail, the part where someone else’s misery or expectations or neediness crept into her carefully prescribed world. It was such a burden, other people’s lives. She did love Leo. She’d loved him in a host of different ways at different times in their lives, and she did want whatever their current thing was to continue. Probably. But she always came back to this: She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out of that particular divot.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, The Nest

tags: loneliness, relationships, solitude

2 likes

“Annie, who up until this very day had always felt like a child--which is why she could not marry, she could not be a wife--now felt quietly ancient. She thought how for years onstage she had used the image of walking up the dirt road holding her father's hand, the snow-covered fields spread around them, the woods in the distance, joy spilling through her--how she had used this scene to have tears immediately come to her eyes, for the happiness of it, and the loss of it. And now she wondered if it had even happened, if the road had ever been narrow and dirt, if her father had ever held her hand and said that his family was the most important thing to him.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Anything Is Possible

tags: acting, acting-life-actress, closeted, surprises

9 likes

More of Peter’s quotes…