28 Quotes by Joseph O'Connor

Oh so maddening, how memory works, or doesn’t work, when you are old. Every square in a counterpane you owned when you were five, you remember the sequence, the colours. But then people were so important to you, and now even their names are melted away.

Confronting authority, one has only two choices: Surrender, or try to confuse it.

How the prisoner and the immigrant are treated by the government, how the poor are treated and those without influence: this is secretly how the government would like to treat us all.

They had no previous connection whatever with Connemara; but they saw connections where others who should have seen them simply looked the other way.

The belief that wickedness is the province of monsters, not men, is consoling to those who are young.[Bram Stoker]

Excellence is all around, sometimes so obvious that we miss it.

They had far more in common than either realised. One was born Catholic, the other Protestant. One was born Irish, the other British. But neither was the greatest difference between them. One was born rich and the other poor.

It is not a matter of ends justifying means: but of the creation of new means and new ends.

A bloodstained, scarlet sky, streaked with finger-smears of black and handfuls of hard-flung gold. Then a watery dawn rises out of the marshlands, pale blues and greys and muddied-down greens, like daybreak in a virgin's watercolour.