Milkman Quotes

“Cats are not adoring like dogs. They don’t care. They can never be relied upon to shore up a human ego. They go their way, do their thing, are not subservient and will never apologise. No one has ever come across a cat apologising and if a cat did, it would patently be obvious it was not being sincere.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be adult.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“At the time, age eighteen, having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were – if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there? At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“It’s not about being happy,’ he said, which was, and still is, the saddest remark I’ve ever heard.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“Being loved back by the person he loved to the point where he couldn't cope anymore with the vulnerable reciprocity of giving and receiving, he ended the relationship to get it over with before he lost it”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, centuries and millennia of being one colour officially and three colours unofficially, a colourful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“According to the police, of course, our community was a rogue community. It was we who were the enemy, we who were the terrorists, the civilian terrorists, the associates of terrorists or simply individuals suspected of being but not yet discovered to be terrorists. That being the case, and understood by both parties to be the case, the only time you’d call the police in my area would be if you were going to shoot them, and naturally they would know this and so wouldn’t come.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“Still,' he said. 'Ach,' I said. 'Ach nothing,' he said. 'Ach sure,' I said. 'Ach sure what?' he said. 'Ach sure, if that's how you feel.' 'Ach sure, of course that's how I feel.' 'Ach all right then.' 'Ach,' he said. 'Ach,' I said. 'Ach,' he said. 'Ach,' I said. 'Ach.'

So that was settled.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“Of course there was the big one, the biggest reason for not marrying the right spouse. If you married that one, the one you loved and desired and who loved and desired you back, with the union providing true and good and replete with the most fulfilling happiness, well, what if this wonderful spouse didn't fall out of love with you, or you with them, and neither of you either, got killed in the political problems? All those joyful evers and infinites? Are you sure, really, really sure, you could cope with the prospect of that? The community decided that no, it couldn't.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“When all was said and done, daughter, what had he got to be psychological about?' She meant depressions, for da had had them: big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud, infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave type of depressions. Ma herself didn't get depressions, didn't either, tolerate depressions and, as with lots of people here who didn't get them and didn't tolerate them, she wanted to shake those who did until they caught themselves on. Of course at that time they weren't called depressions. They were 'moods'. People got 'moods'. They were 'moody'.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“People always said you'd better be careful. Though how, when things are out of your hands, when things were never really in your hands, when things are stacked against you, does a person - the little person down here on the earth - be that?”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“... I didn't officially live with him and wasn't officially committed to him. If we were in a proper relationship and I did live with him and was officially committed to him, the first thing I would have to do would be to leave.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“how much I’d been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“Lots of people haven't done anything,' said longest friend. 'And still they're not doing it, will always be not doing it, in their private coffins down at the usual place.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“So shiny was bad and 'too sad' was bad, and 'too joyous' was bad, which meant you had to go around not being anything; also nit thinking, least not at the top level, which was why everybody kept their private thoughts safe and sound in those recesses underneath.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be present, be adult.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“I'd rather you came out with your filthy, unfitting language for the rest of your life than for you to turn out one of them cowardly people who can't speak their minds but won't hold their peace and instead mumble behind hands and get their fights out in sneakery and in whispers.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“What if one person happened to be sane, longest friend, against a whole background, a race mind, that wasn't sane, that person would probably be viewed by the mass consciousness as mad - but would that person be mad?”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“So yes, keep the lid on, buy old books, read old books, seriously consider those scrolls and clay tablets.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“As for the environment, that too, would object, backing up the pessimism of its people, which was what happened where I lived where the whole place always seemed to be in the dark. It was as if the electric lights were turned off, always turned off, even though dusk was over so they should have been turned on yet nobody was turning them on and nobody noticed either, they weren’t on.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“She admonished him, saying ‘I think I hate you,’ which meant she didn’t because ‘I think I hate you’ is the same as ‘probably I hate you’, which is the same as ‘I don’t know if I hate you’, which is the same as ‘I don’t hate you, oh my God, my love, I love you, still love you, always, always have I loved you and never have I stopped loving you’.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“The sky is blue,’ came us. ‘What colour else can it be?’
Of course we knew really that the sky could be more than blue, two more, but why should any of us admit to that? I myself have never admitted it. Not even the week before when I experienced my first sunset with maybe-boyfriend did I admit it. Even then, even though there were more colours than the acceptable three in the sky – blue (the day sky), black (the night sky) and white (clouds) – that evening still I kept my mouth shut. And now the others in this class – all older than me, some as old as thirty – also weren’t admitting it. It was the convention not to admit it, not to accept detail for this type of detail would mean choice and choice would mean responsibility and what if we failed in our responsibility? Failed too, in the interrogation of the consequence of seeing more than we could cope with? Worse, what if it was nice, whatever it was, and we liked it, got used to it, were cheered up by it, came to rely upon it, only for it to go away, or be wrenched away, never to come back again? Better not to have had it in the first place was the prevailing feeling, and that was why blue was the colour for our sky to be.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“It broke the bounds of credibility, said the news, but lots of things in life break bounds of credibility. Breaking credibility, I was coming to understand, seemed to be what life was about.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“She meant depressions, for da had had them: big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud, infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave type of depressions.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“What if we accept these points of light, their translucence, their brightness; what if we let ourselves enjoy this, stop fearing it, get used to it; what if we come to believe in it, to expect it, to be impressed upon by it; what if we take hope and forgo our ancient heritage and instead, and infused, begin to entrain with it, with ourselves then to radiate it; what if we do that, get educated up to that, and then, just like that, the light goes off or is snatched away?”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“these were paranoid times. These were knife-edge times, primal times, with everybody suspicious of everybody. You could have a nice wee conversation with someone here, then go away and think, that was a nice, wee unguarded conversation I just had there – least until you start playing it back in your head later on. At that point you start to worry that you said 'this' or 'that', not because “this' or 'that' were contentious. It was that people were quick to point fingers, to judge, to add on even in peaceful times, so it would be hard to fathom fingers not getting pointed and words not being added.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“Some too, would make mention of the actual word ‘rumour’, as in ‘Rumour says’, before going on to personify rumour, as if it wasn’t they who were launching or perpetuating Rumour themselves.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“If only I’d done such and such instead of such and such, gone there instead of there, said that and not that, or looked different, or hadn’t gone out that day with Ivanhoe or that night or that week or anytime during the last two months”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“If we were in a proper relationship and I did live with him and was officially committed to him, first thing I would have to do would be to leave.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman