“The first thing he noticed was how quiet it was. This was nothing like the kind of quiet he heard when he woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. When that happened, there were always strange, unidentifiable sounds seeping into his room from the tiny gaps where the windowpanes weren't sealed together correctly. At those moments he could always tell there was life outside, even if all that life was fast asleep. It was a silence that wasn't silence at all.”
― John Boyne, quote from Noah Barleywater Runs Away
“Do you think . . . ?"
'I do sometimes, my boy,'admitted the old man. 'When I can't avoid it.”
― John Boyne, quote from Noah Barleywater Runs Away
“I like 'fresh fruit flan'," said the donkey. "Three excellent words."
"I don't have one," said Noah immediately before the question could even be asked, and the donkey opened his eyes wide in suprise, and for a moment Noah wondered whether he might even consider eating him.”
― John Boyne, quote from Noah Barleywater Runs Away
“These were colours he'd never ever seen before; ones he couldn't possibly begin to name. Here, to his left, was a wooden clock, and it was painted, well not exactly green, but a colour that green might like to be if it had any imagination at all. And over there, beside the wooden board game whose overriding colour was not red, but something that red might look at enviously, blushing with embarrassment at its own dull appearance. And the wooden letter sets, well, there were those who might have said that they were painted yellow and blue, but they would have said this knowing that such plain words were an outrageous insult to the colouring on the letters themselves.”
― John Boyne, quote from Noah Barleywater Runs Away
“Here's a tip though', he told me, leaning over and pressing a hand into my shoulder. 'If you want to improve your time, run faster.”
― John Boyne, quote from Noah Barleywater Runs Away
“It was important to look confident, he realized that very early on. After all, there was a terrible tendency among adults to look at children travelling alone as if they were planning a crime of some sort. None of them ever thought that it might just be a young chap on his way to see the world and have a great adventure. They were so small minded, grown-ups. That was one of their many problems.”
― John Boyne, quote from Noah Barleywater Runs Away
John Boyne
Born place: in Dublin, Ireland
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“But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its
justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a
sense of possibility.
Whoever has it does not say, for instance:
Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen;
but he invents:
Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen.
If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise.
[...]
Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood.
Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned
that such persons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know-it-alls,
or troublemakers.
Such fools are also called idealists by those who wish to praise them.
But all this clearly applies only to their weak subspecies, those
who cannot comprehend reality or who, in their melancholic condition,
avoid it. These are people in whom the lack of a sense of reality
is a real deficiency.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Man Without Qualities
“And in its sky was such a sun as no opium eater could ever have imagined in his wildest dreams. Too hot to be white, it was a searing ghost at the frontiers of the ultraviolet, burning its planets with radiations which would be instantly lethal to all earthly forms of life. For millions of kilometers around extended great veils of gas and dust, fluorescing in countless colors as the blasts of ultraviolet tore through them. It was a star against which Earth’s pale sun would have been as feeble as a glowworm at noon.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from Childhood's End
“Breeze chuckled. "He was completely insane, you know. The worse things got, the more he'd joke. I
remember how chipper he was the very day after one of our worst defeats, when we lost most of our
skaa army to that fool Yeden. Kell walked in, a spring in his step, making one of his inane jokes."
"Sounds insensitive," Allrianne said.
Ham shook his head. "No. He was just determined. He always said that laughter was something the
Lord Ruler couldn't take from him. He planned and executed the overthrow of a thousand-year
empire—and he did it as a kind of . . . penance for letting his wife die thinking that he hated her. But, he
did it all with a smirk on his lips. Like every joke was his way of slapping fate in the face."
"We need what he had," Elend said.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from The Hero of Ages
“The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors
“I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night
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