58 Quotes by Paul Murray

Lack is the last great gold rush, Claude. The world is poor and getting poorer. But we can turn that to our advantage. When someone’s got nothing, does he care how much debt he gets into? When he’s walled in and someone offers him a way out, does he stop to read the small print?

I don’t mind crack,” I said. “I like crack as much as the next man. But it’s not doing a thing for my nerves, and I already have a splitting headache – I say, I don’t suppose those heroin dealers carry Anadin or acetaminophen or anything like that, do they?” “I think they just have heroin, Charlie.

I believe his lies, so he believes mine.′ She turns and looks at me straight on. ‘That’s how it goes at the end of love.

If it’s a choice between a difficult truth and a simple lie, people will take the lie every time. Even if it kills them.

Prayer – Christian prayer – by its very nature is born out of an acknowledgment of need, out of an honest recognition of spiritual poverty.

The importance of humor is primarily to puncture fixed ideas – to make us step back and realize that our situation, whatever it may be, is, in the grand scheme of things, always contingent and arbitrary and ephemeral. And that helps us to deal with our emotions and to keep going. Holding on to one perspective, on the other hand, whether it takes the form of grief or anger or a particular political standpoint, is often destructive to us and to those around us.

It’s like when you find out your lover has been unfaithful: in one horrible instant everything she was to you, the whole beautiful enchantment, falls away, and you see her as she really is – mortal, machinating, tethered like everyone else to a little patch of space and time. And the worst of it is that you knew all along.

It used to be the smartest people didn’t always want to be the richest people.

People don’t want the truth,′ he says, waving a hand at the streets around us. ‘They want better-quality lies. High definition lies on fifty-inch screens.