Here Are the Young Men Quotes

“Ye see, drink pulls ye back into yer body. It anchors ye in yer physical experience, whereas marijuana on the other hand makes ye float further out into the cosmic realms, the non-visible reality. ... The fuckin spirit world. And that, ladies, is why the Irishman drinks so much: cos he’s already far enough out in the other world, due to his inborn Irish nature. He doesn’t need something to take him out there to the fairies and the spirits and the bleedin demons. He’s already there, so the oul grog helps to keep him grounded, it doesn’t let him drift too far out. The drink is better for the Irishman than the weed.”
― Rob Doyle, Here Are the Young Men

“It had turned into a sunny day, a brief opening in the grey cloud-wall that had hidden the sky for months. There were a lot of people making the most of it before the sky-blue was swallowed up again. Pasty parents laid out mats and kept an anxious eye on their children, who waded into the sea like a generation of suicides. Every father, no matter how young, seemed to have a beer belly, and all the mothers had flabby, cellulite-lined legs. The men stripped off their GAA or English football jerseys. The women wore bathing suits of pink or idiot-yellow. In the hazy sunlit drunkenness I felt deflated by the scene.
‘All the happy families,’ said Cocker as we spread out a blanket and sat down.”
― Rob Doyle, Here Are the Young Men

“The sun cheerfully mounted the morning sky and we lay about, off our heads and laughing in the sunshine like it was all a big fucking Coke ad.”
― Rob Doyle, Here Are the Young Men

“He’s just the only relevant director, the only one. Every other film ye see is just totally obsolete, just completely dishonest. The thing with Tarantino is that he doesn’t pretend there’s a real world out there for his films to show us – there are only more films. And the “real world” is only a copy of films – Tarantino knows this. Ah, he’s just amazin. But all these other directors, they keep tryin to make films about “real” people – as if they still exist! They just don’t get it. I mean, like, ye see a guy in a film, and he’s sittin in a doorway down some alley, wearin a dark coat and drinkin whiskey from a hip flask. And we’re supposed to believe that what ye see is what ye get, and this character is doin all this in a natural way, and he’s not even aware of the glamour of it, of how much it reminds ye of, like, fifty other films. Whereas in “real life” the camera is always on you. You’re always in a film.’
‘That’s the point of Tarantino – he’s after givin up on reality. He knows that it disappeared back in the forties or whenever. He doesn’t pretend we’re still livin in that time when people had, like, emotional journeys and dramatic conflicts and, ye know, moral dilemmas. He’s cut the crap.”
― Rob Doyle, Here Are the Young Men

“I wouldn’t work even if they paid me for it. Never get out of bed for less than ye got into it for, that’s my way of lookin at it. There’s a hundred solid reasons not to work. The big one for me is that it distracts me from me poetry.’
‘Ye write poetry?’
‘Of course I do. If this wasn’t such a cretinized culture, all real men would be writin poetry. It used to be a sign of manliness – and now they’d have ye think it’s effeminate! Can ye believe that, how far we’ve fuckin regressed?”
― Rob Doyle, Here Are the Young Men