Paul murray Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: Paul Murray
Quotes of Author: Paul Murray

Paul Murray _ Skippy Dies
Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg – that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you'd imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of 'life'.
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Paul Murray _ Praying with Confidence
The word `Father' is a small word but, by pronouncing it in prayer, and in particular by repeating the phrase `Our Father', we are achieving `five things', Thomas tells us in his Lectures on St Matthew. First of all, the words `instruct us in our faith'; second, they `raise our hopes'; third, `they serve to stimulate charity'; fourth, they invite us `to imitate God'; and fifth, they call us `to humility'.
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Paul Murray _ Skippy Dies
Above the lot, the great pink hoop of the Ed's Doughnut House sign broadcasts its frigid synthetic light into the night,
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Paul Murray _ Skippy Dies
{'Cute how?' Zephyr asked her. 'Irish-looking,' Halley said, by which she meant a collection of indistinct features – pale skin, mousy hair, general air of ill-health – that combine to mysteriously powerful romantic effect.}"
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Paul Murray _ Skippy Dies
For Guido the past, like a Third World country, was merely another resource to be exploited and abandoned when the time comes; and that is why civilization is built by men like him and the Automator, and not men like Howard, who have never quite worked out which stories are disposable, and which, if any, you're actually supposed to believe.
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Paul Murray _ Skippy Dies
She hadn't written so much as a word of a story, but for the first time in a long time she felt she was inside a story of her own, and surely that was better yet.
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Paul Murray _ The Mark and the Void: A Novel
Remington, for God's sake, stop burping.' 'It's my burp-day.
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Paul Murray _ Skippy Dies
These daydreams persisted like an alternate life"
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Paul Murray _ Skippy Dies
The fact is that, after the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, the Irishmen who'd fought in the Great War didn't fit the new way the country imagined itself. If the British were our sworn enemies, why had two hundred thousand Irishmen gone off to fight alongside them? If our history was the struggle to escape from British oppression, what were we doing helping Britain out, fighting and dying on her behalf? The existence of these soldiers seemed to argue against this new thing called Ireland. And so, first of all, they were turned into traitors. Then, in a quite systematic way, they were forgotten.'The boys listen palely, the lucent grass-green of the empty park shimmering around them.'It's a good example of how history works,' Howard says. 'We tend to think of it as something solid and unchanging, appearing out of nowhere etched in stone like the Ten Commandments. But history, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn't make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn't fit. And often that is quite a lot.
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Paul Murray _ Skippy Dies
Cutting through Temple Bar toward the river, they pass the cinema outside which Howard met Halley for the first time: this nugget of history he does not pass on to the boys. He remembers walking with her down to the riverside, but it's only as they are crossing Ha'penny Bridge – the elderly construction seeming to sway beneath their impatient feet, the quays of the city stretching away on either side – that he remembers the museum was where she had been headed that day too, was where he had promised to take her, but never did, instead falling in love with her, leading her away into the backstreets of his life. Now he's finally on his way there, but with twenty-six hormonal teenage boys instead of her. Nice job, Howard.
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Paul Murray _ Skippy Dies
A dainty man of a nervous disposition, Father Laughton detests discord above all things. He always climbs down before seriously disagreeing with anyone; he can't dismiss the most disruptive student from his class without feeling sorry twenty seconds later and racing down the corridor to summon him back. As a result, his music appreciation courses are notoriously anarchic – in fact they make anarchy look like a slow day at the library – and yet, at the same time, they are marked by a kind of goodwill, and the priest always seems happy there, in the midst of the melee, humming along to a Field larghetto or a Chopin mazurka while paper planes, pencil cases, books and larger objects fly through the air around him.
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Paul Murray _ Skippy Dies
It's a confidentiality clause. No doubt you'll be familiar with these from your days in the City. In signing, you consent by law not to disclose sensitive information pertaining to school affairs, including what we have discussed here today.'Howard gapes back at him stupidly. 'Are you serious?''Merely a precaution, Howard, making sure we've got all our angles covered. No need to rush into it right away. Take it home with you, think it over. If you want to turn it down, do the honorable thing, I can't stop you. I'm sure you'll find a position elsewhere easily enough. Gather there are vacancies in St Anthony's at the moment. Teacher got stabbed there just last week.
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