I Am Mary Dunne Quotes

“We had not written or phoned or called or even sent a lousy card. We were young: we had our troubles. If there is a hell it should be for selfishness.”
― Brian Moore, I Am Mary Dunne

“    There, in the dining-room, amid the wreck of dinner glasses, dishes, wine bottles, there settled on all three of us an instant of total immobility, as though the film of our lives had jammed. We sat, frozen in stop frame, until, suddenly, Ernie's head jerked forward and he turned to me, his face screwed up in a painful parody of a boy's embarrassed grin. 'Yes,' he said. 'I guess I have finished. Eh, Maria? Golly, I've gone and done it again. Made a fool of myself, imposed on people's kindness, irritated the people I most want to be friends with. You and Terence. Golly.'
    Having castigated himself, he, like all those people who are quick to apologize, considered himself at once forgiven. He grinned again and said, 'What a horse's ass I am. I'll bet that's what you're thinking?' ”
― Brian Moore, I Am Mary Dunne

“In the carnival hall of mirrors which is our memory, we distort what we see. In Ernie's mirror image of me, I am magnified, elongated into a girl who led him on, the object of his great, unhappy, unfulfilled love. While he, in the equal if opposite distortion of my mind's mirror, is reduced to a squat manikin from my past, a dull stranger, remembered only for his minor quirks.”
― Brian Moore, I Am Mary Dunne

“I am, always have been, a fool who rushes in, a blurter-out of awkward truths, a speaker-up at parties who, the morning after, filled with guilt, vows that never again, no matter what, but who, faced at the very next encounter with someone whose opinions strike me as unfair, rushes in again, blurting out, breaking all vows.”
― Brian Moore, I Am Mary Dunne