The Queen of Dirt Island Quotes

“Our bodies know they’re getting old but sometimes our hearts have to be reminded.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“Happiness was a strange notion, something that was wrapped neatly, and packed into the closing scenes of television shows and daytime films, sharply relieved on the screen, but blurry in real life, a vague ideal”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“Сигурно греховете, за които човек си плаща, са извършени в някой дуг живот.”
― Донал Райън, The Queen of Dirt Island

“Nana didn’t say much, just a few judicious wisecracks. Hmm. You’ll have to either get a smaller arse or a bigger skirt, Eileen.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“She felt sad in that moment for anyone in the world who didn’t have a mother like hers. A mother who was standing now above her quarry like a prizefighter in a swell of victory, looking slowly left and right as if to challenge with her silent stare any comers, who was looking at the windows and doorways of her neighbours’ houses through dark eyes flashing with anger and wild strength.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“There's no going back for man or God or any creature that ever lived. We can only go back in our minds and even then we're going back to something that doesn't exist. So we can forget changing the past and all we can do is look after our present moment, planting good seeds in it so that our next moments might be fruitful.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“He used his delicate sorrows as a battering ram, smashing his way into people’s hearts, where he could reside until he was bored, taking what he wanted.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“and she found things in her memory that she hadn’t been fully aware of, things that had lain unexamined and unfelt inside of her for all these years.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“What could be known about people in their privacies? No eyes could see beyond a closed door or into a heart.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“Time will wind its own sweet way. We have no choice but to keep up.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother had walked her to the classroom door and Mammy had cried a bit and Granny had told her to cop on and Nana then had told Granny to cop on herself and they’d nearly started one of their fights right there in front of all the other children and parents and the teacher”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“They understood each other, you see. They had a way of being around one another that was based on each having a natural grasp of the other’s particularities and peccadilloes; they nursed one another’s wounds without ever seeming to do so, they fed one another’s spirits, and an outsider looking in, listening to the seeming rancour of their discourse, hearing the names the younger woman would call the older woman, the way she’d threaten almost daily to strangle her, to suffocate her, to drown her, to shoot her, to take her to the fucking vet, could not be blamed for supposing them to be mortal enemies, and for worrying that the older woman’s welfare was in danger, that her very life was under constant threat.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“What did she look like again? Like a one that had one leg shorter than the other but had it fixed but then never learnt to walk straight afterwards.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“He slowed and stopped and reached across to open the passenger door from the inside and the man sat in, a man he knew, a man whose sons were his friends, whose daughter he’d courted for a while one long summer years ago, a man he liked and respected and who smelt on this spring morning like yesterday’s drink, a smell safe and familiar, like apples windfallen and turning rotten.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“and battling through their lives. But that was not her dream to dream.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island