The Heart's Invisible Furies Quotes

“Maybe there were no villains in my mother’s story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart's invisible furies on his face.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“I remember a friend of mine once telling me that we hate what we fear in ourselves,”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“What you know about women,” replied Maude, “could be written in large font on the back of a postage stamp and there’d still be room for the Lord’s Prayer.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“It's as if she understood completely the condition of loneliness and how it undermines us all, forcing us to make choices that we know are wrong for us.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“I've always believed that if women could only collectively harness the power that they have then they'd rule the world.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“If there is one thing I've learned in more than seven decades of life, it's that the world is a completely fucked-up place. You never know what's around the corner and it's often something unpleasant.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“I’ve spent so much time pushing the boat out that I forgot to jump on and now it’s out beyond the harbour on the high seas, but it’s very nice to look at.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“You look like a Greek God sent down by the immortal Zeus from Mount Olympus to taunt the rest of us inferior beings with your astonishing beauty, I said, which somehow in translation came out as "you look fine, why?”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“It's not easy losing someone," she said. "It never goes away, does it?" "The Phantom Pain, they call it," I said. "Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“Every man is afraid of women as far as I can see,” said Julian, displaying an understanding of the universe far beyond his years. “That’s true,” she said. “But only because most men are not as smart as women and yet they continue to hold all the power. They fear a change of the world order.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“You were never a real Avery,” he hissed. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I do,” I said.
“But Christ on a bike, you came close. You came damned close.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“Do you enjoy being a writer, Mrs Avery?” asked Julian.
“No, of course not, she said. “It’s a hideous profession. Entered into by narcissists who think their pathetic little imaginations will be of interest to people they’ve never met.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“It was a difficult time to be Irish, a difficult time to be twenty-one years of age and a difficult time to be a man who was attracted to other men. To be all three simultaneously required a level of subterfuge and guile that felt contrary to my nature.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“Does it ever get easier?" she asked.
I nodded. "It does," I said. You reach a point where you realize that your life must go on regardless. You choose to live or you choose to die. But then there are moments, things that you see, something funny on the street or or a good joke that you hear, a television program that you want to share, and it makes you miss the person who's gone terribly and then it's not grief at all, it's more a sort of bitterness at the world for taking them away from you. I think of Bastiaan every day, of course. But I've grown accustomed to his absence.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“The women are always the whores; the priests are always the good men who were led astray.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“There’s nothing more tedious than a grown man blaming his parents, birth or otherwise, for all the things that have gone wrong in his life.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“Anything is possible,’ I said. ‘But most things are unlikely.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“I had never considered myself to be a dishonest person, hating the idea that I was capable of such mendacity and deceit, but the more I examined the architecture of my life, the more I realized how fraudulent were its foundations. The belief that I would spend the rest of my time on earth lying to people weighed heavily on me and at such times I gave serious consideration to taking my own life.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“I was deluding myself, for love was one thing but desire was something else entirely.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“no man with any sense should marry the girl to whom he loses his virginity. It’s like learning to drive in some clapped-out old banger and then holding on to it for the rest of your life when you’ve developed the skill to handle a BMW in rush-hour traffic on a busy Autobahn.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“He tells a story, and that's what I like. Does this fella tell a story? He doesn't spend twenty pages describing the colour of the sky?'
'He hasn't so far.'
'Good. Jeffrey Archer never talks about the colour of the sky and I like that in a writer. I'd say Jeffrey Archer has never even looked up at the sky his entire life.'
'Especially now that he's in prison,' I suggested.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“We’re none of us normal. Not in this fucking country.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“A marriage should be about friendship and companionship, not about sex.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“What you know about women,” replied Maude, “could be written in large font on the back of a postage stamp and there’d still be room for the Lord’s Prayer. For all your”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“I may not have known much about pregnancies but I knew that you couldn’t have a son or a daughter without actually doing it first. The priests at school had once muttered something to the effect that when a mummy and a daddy loved each other very much, they lay close together and the Holy Spirit descended upon them to create the miracle of new life. (Charles, in his one attempt at a man-to-man talk with me, had put it rather differently. ‘Get her kit off,’ he said. ‘Play with her tits a bit, because the ladies love that. Then just stick your cock in her pussy and ram it in and out a bit. Don’t hang around too long in there – it’s not a bloody train station. Just do your business and get on with your day.’ It’s no wonder he managed to secure so many wives, the old romantic.) I”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“I’ve always felt that the Catholic Church has the same relationship to God as a fish has to a bicycle.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“Most men are not as smart as women and yet they continue to hold all the power. They fear a change of the world order.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“Why do they hate us so much anyway?’ I asked after a lengthy pause. ‘If they’re not queer themselves, then what does it matter to them if someone else is?’ ‘I remember a friend of mine once telling me that we hate what we fear in ourselves,’ she said with a shrug.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies