Smile Quotes

“I told Myles Bradley quite clearly that I’d been molested. But I’d kept talking. I should have stopped after I’d told him about the man’s weight holding me down. I didn’t exactly bury the story – my story – but I made it, somehow, an expected part of every Irishman’s education. A bit of gas. Not so bad. Part of what we are.”
― Roddy Doyle, Smile

“There’s a joke I heard years ago, about an Irishman who ends up on a desert island with Claudia Schiffer, after a plane crash. There’s just the two of them, sitting on the sand. After a few days of this, she moves closer to him. ‘Do you wish to ride me, Dermot?’ she says. ‘Jesus, Claudia,’ he says. ‘Like – are you sure?’ ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We will be here for quite some time, I think. And the days are quite long – yes?’ So, they start riding. All day. And Claudia falls hopelessly in love with him. This goes on for months until one day, the Irishman stands up and moves down the beach a bit and sits by himself. Claudia gets up and follows him. ‘Dermot?’ she says. ‘Is something the matter?’ ‘Ah, sure,’ he says. ‘I’m just a bit down in the dumps.’ ‘Is there something I can do to help?’ she asks him. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘This might sound mad. But would you mind if I called you Des?’ She looks at him, then says, ‘Alright. I will permit this.’ ‘Great,’ he says. ‘Brilliant, thanks.’ He’s holding a piece of charcoal that he found on the beach. He shows it to Claudia and he says, ‘And, like – would you mind if I drew a moustache on you?’ And she looks at him again, and says, ‘Alright, Dermot. This, too, I will permit.’ ‘Ah, great – thanks.’ He draws a rough moustache on her, then stands back. Then he grabs her shoulders, shakes her, and says, ‘Des! Des! You won’t believe who I’ve been riding for the last three months!”
― Roddy Doyle, Smile

“It was the last time I slept in my mother's house and it was the last time I went for pints with the lads. Two of them are dead. I miss them like I miss my father; I wish I'd known them.”
― Roddy Doyle, Smile

“—I see people walking, he said.—Just during the day, like. I see them and they all seem to know where they’re going. And I always think they’re keeping the secret from me. Where they’re going – where they know they’re going. I’ve always felt that. Left out, I suppose. Excluded”
― Roddy Doyle, Smile

“Why the loft? Why only there, and only then? Now – today – I think it was because I was happy. I didn’t think that then. I couldn’t have. I didn’t know I was happy and I didn’t know that happiness was finite.”
― Roddy Doyle, Smile

“Only once, I told them. It had happened only once. That was true. But it came back more than once, after that first time. Whatever it was. The Drop. That was what I named it. —The Drop? Rachel would ask. Always at night. Always lying down. Only in the loft. Only in those two years. She liked the name. It did the trick, caged it, made it comical.”
― Roddy Doyle, Smile

“We don’t take it too seriously, said Harry. —What? —The golf. —To avoid the disappointment, said Liam.—The same with everything. That’s what it’s all about now, isn’t it? From here on in. Avoiding disappointment.”
― Roddy Doyle, Smile

“Girls walk into a room. The boys sit up. Women in their late forties walk into a room. Men in their fifties sit up, straighten their backs, pull down the fronts of their hoodies. It made me want to cry. I felt I was going right back into the life I’d missed.”
― Roddy Doyle, Smile

“said. I laughed. I know now: I didn’t laugh much until I met Rachel. It’s corny but true. I only laughed when other people were laughing. But now I started laughing. I started laughing, and she joined me. She stopped outside the Unitarian Church.”
― Roddy Doyle, Smile

“It would be okay to laugh one minute, then someone would be bent over, holding his arm where Tom Jones had thumped him. I’d watch tears drop on the wooden floor and I’d love Tom Jones because they weren’t my tears.”
― Roddy Doyle, Smile

“I’d become a bully. The something – the resolve – that had let me send in those first pieces, put them in the envelope and post them; that resolve – it was something like that – or ambition; whatever it was, it was gone. Ambition was a decision, not a trait. There were no more decisions. I couldn’t think of anything that I could do.”
― Roddy Doyle, Smile

“I’d made a girl laugh and touch my arm when I’d told her that I was thinking of rewriting it as a musical after the finals. But I couldn’t look at her while I spoke. I could look at her, briefly, and say nothing. Or I could make her laugh while I looked over her shoulder or at a wall. I couldn’t do both. But I could write.”
― Roddy Doyle, Smile

“There were nine or ten years between the brat with a borrowed typewriter who lived at home with his mother and the stay-at-home (sometimes) father, and between Dublin’s hottest bass player and the self-employed tech consultant (or something), both waiting for their children to come out of their Educate Together school. —How many have you? —Just the one – yourself? —Three. —Jesus. —I know. Those nine or ten years yawned – a gulf, a different time and world. But the twenty years since feel like a couple of months.”
― Roddy Doyle, Smile

“I began to understand what Murphy was saying and what it meant. I knew the lads would destroy me after the bell went and we were outside. And they did. They didn’t even have to wait until we were outside the school grounds. The Brothers never minded violence. There was no point in trying to avoid it. I was surrounded, pushed. —Yeh fuckin’ queer. —I didn’t smile. A schoolbag – a Leeds United kitbag – was swung high and into my back. It hurt but I laughed. The slaps became thumps. They were all over me now. But it wouldn’t last; I knew that too. I was kicked, punched, spat on. For a minute. Only a few of the kicks really hurt, and the thumps were just to my arms and chest. No one thumped or kicked me in my face. The spitting – we did that all the time. It was over. There was space around me. They’d drifted away. Only my real friends stayed behind. They laughed. And I laughed. I could breathe. It was over.”
― Roddy Doyle, Smile