City of Bohane Quotes

“Tricky the paths a long love might follow, like the spiral down twists of a raindrop on a windowpane.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“It was one of those summers you’re nostalgic for even before it passes. Pale, bled skies. Thunderstorms in the night. Sour-smelling dawns. It brought temptation, and yearning, and ache – these are the summer things.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“Mouth of teeth on him like a vandalised graveyard but we all have our crosses.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“Oh give us a grim Tuesday of December, with the hardwind taking schleps at our heads, and the rain coming slantways off that hideous fucking ocean, and the grapes nearly frozen off us, and dirty ice caked up top of the puddles, and we are not happy, exactly, but satisfied in our despair.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“One might trouble one's dainty snout with a whiff of the taleggio displayed in an artisanal cheese shop, or take a saucer of jasmine tea and a knuckle of fennel-scented snuff at a counter of buffed Big Nothing granite. But there was a want in these ladies yet, and it was for the rude life of youth.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“It was Dominick Gleeson, aka Big Dom, editor of the city's only newspaper, the Bohane Vindicator. Of course, it was in no small part thanks to Logan Hartnett that the Vindicator remained the city's only newspaper. Its masthead solgan: 'Truth or Vengeance', as inked above a motif of two quarrelling ravens.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“Logan wore:
A pale green suit, slim-cut, of thin spring cotton, a pair of burnt-orange arsekickers with a pronounced, bulbous toe, a ruffle-fronted silver shirt open at the neck, a purple neckscarf, a pallor of magnificently wasted elegance, and his hair this season swept back at the forehead and worn just slightly longer, so that it trailed past the ruff of his jacket. Also, a three-day stubble.
Was the Long Fella's opinion that, if anything, his suffering made him even more gauntly beautiful. He had all the handsome poignancy of heartbreak.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“The gulls were going loolah on the dockside stones.
Of course those gulls were never right. That is often said. The sheer derangement in their eyes, and the untranslatable evil of their cawing as they dive-bomb the streets. The gulls of Bohane are one ignorant pack of fuckers. He had missed them terribly.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“Whatever’s wrong with us is coming in off that river. No argument: the taint of badness on the city’s air is a taint off that river. This is the Bohane river we’re talking about. A blackwater surge, malevolent, it roars in off the Big Nothin’ wastes and the city was pawned by it and was named for it: city of Bohane.

He walked the docks and breathed in the sweet badness of the river. It was past midnight on the Bohane front. There was an evenness to his
footfall, a slow calm rhythm of leather on stone, and the dockside lamps burned in the night-time a green haze, the light of a sad dream. The water’s roar for Hartnett was as the rushing of his own blood and
as he passed the merchant yards the guard dogs strung out a sequence of howls all along the front. See the dogs: their hackles heaped, their yellow eyes livid. We could tell he was coming by the howling of the dogs.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“The Bohane all the while ferried a drag of gravel and stones and the drag swirled drunkenly deep down – it had the sound of chains being swung.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“wisps of steam like spectral maggots rose from their damp coats in the inn's fuggyheat”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

“rabid tush patrol”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane