Top 40 Adrian McKinty Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Life is a cascade of nows falling on top of one another without meaning or purpose. Of all the philosophers, only Schopenhauer ever got that right.”

— Adrian McKinty

2. “Twelve-year-old Islay. Good stuff if you liked peat, smoke, earth, rain, despair, and the Atlantic Ocean, and who doesn’t like that?”

— Adrian McKinty

3. “As J. G. Ballard pointed out, civilization is just a thin, fragile veneer over the law of the jungle: Better you than me. Better your kid than my kid.”

— Adrian McKinty

4. “Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It’s part of our DNA. That’s why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.”

— Adrian McKinty

5. “The darkness keeps its own counsel.”

— Adrian McKinty

6. “A bullet in the head will fix an incipient asthma attack every time.”

— Adrian McKinty

7. “Johnnie Walker in the tea, Jim Beam in the coffee.”

— Adrian McKinty

8. “Chemo is a little death that you invite in in order to keep the big death waiting outside on the porch.”

— Adrian McKinty

9. “A true predator sometimes kills even when it isn’t hungry.”

— Adrian McKinty

10. “Number one: you are not the first and you will certainly not be the last. Number two: remember, it’s not about the money – it’s about The Chain.”

— Adrian McKinty

11. “Intelligence is no substitute for wisdom. Live long enough to get wise, eh?”

— Adrian McKinty

12. “If you really have to get shot, Belfast is one of the best places to do it. After twenty years of the Troubles, and after thousands of assassination attempts and punishment shootings, Belfast has trained many of the best gunshot-trauma surgeons in the world.”

— Adrian McKinty

13. “George Orwell was wrong, she thinks. In the future, it won’t be the state that keeps tabs on everyone by extensive use of surveillance; it will be the people. They’ll do the state’s work for it by constantly uploading their locations, interests, food preferences, restaurant choices, political ideas, and hobbies to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites. We are our own secret police.”

— Adrian McKinty

14. “A man once told me that all books should end at chapter seventy-seven.”

— Adrian McKinty

15. “Drawing Dead is a brilliant noir from one of Australia’s most exciting new novelists.”

— Adrian McKinty

16. “Patriotism is a hard disease to eradicate, and ennui stamps us all.”

— Adrian McKinty

17. “You ever read Thucydides? I’ll boil him down for you into one easy moral: intergenerational civil war is a very bad thing.”

— Adrian McKinty

18. “The driver had on Radio 1, which was giving us Kylie Minogue’s ‘I should be so lucky’... By the song’s second verse I was already longing for an IRA ambush and and by the second chorus I was dreaming of a rogue comet strike.”

— Adrian McKinty

19. “The minutes ticked past. This is why peelers need a book. A wee paperback to stick in your pocket.”

— Adrian McKinty

20. “Recall that one builds a labyrinth not to hide but to lie in wait.”

— Adrian McKinty

21. “I remembered about the pharma coke, went outside and nailed a line so pure it was like getting yelled at by God. Yorkshire tea, Mrs Campbell’s Black Forest, Bayer cocaine – the lunch of champions.”

— Adrian McKinty

22. “Greek mythology has always been my Achilles elbow.”

— Adrian McKinty

23. “A black Mercedes Benz 450 SL pulled up. It was your classic hood auto beloved of terrorists, pimps and African dictators.”

— Adrian McKinty

24. “Ideally, the business and the personal should never mix, but with human beings there’s always going to be some blurring of the lines.”

— Adrian McKinty

25. “But this was Northern Ireland in 1981 which was slightly less conservative than, say, Salem in 1692.”

— Adrian McKinty

26. “It only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth. Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights.”

— Adrian McKinty

27. “As the Russians say, getting what you want sometimes requires moving like the knight in chess: forward and to the left.”

— Adrian McKinty

28. “They have all sipped from the Drink Me bottle. They have all unwound the clew of red thread. They have all fallen through the looking glass.”

— Adrian McKinty

29. “George Orwell was wrong, she thinks. In the future, it won’t be the state that keeps tabs on everyone by extensive use of surveillance; it will be the people.”

— Adrian McKinty

30. “Fear is coursing through her, but fear is a liberation too. Fear releases power and is the precursor to action.”

— Adrian McKinty

31. “Your body is a blade sharpened by tears.”

— Adrian McKinty

32. “Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.”

— Adrian McKinty

33. “Are you aware of the Japanese concept of mono no aware, the bitter sweetness of things?” “I’m afraid not.” “The Japanese sages say the best way to appreciate beauty is to focus on its transient, fragile and fleeting nature.”

— Adrian McKinty

34. “Nelson had a face like Brian Clough getting sodomised with a pineapple.”

— Adrian McKinty

35. “Perhaps they are worse than evil – they are bored,” Petra said.”

— Adrian McKinty

36. “A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what’s going on.”

— Adrian McKinty

37. “She reflected that the Mad Max movies had been skillfully edited to erase the actual tedium of driving through outback Australia.”

— Adrian McKinty

38. “Ireland in shades of black and green under the gibbous moon. Ireland under the canopy of grey cloud, under the crow’s wing and the helicopter blade. A night ride over the Lagan valley and the bandit country of South Armagh. The music in my head was Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which opens with a hesitant syncopated motif evocative of Mahler’s irregular heartbeat.”

— Adrian McKinty

39. “She was her mother’s favorite saying come to life. The cure for everything is salt water: tears, sweat, or the sea.”

— Adrian McKinty

40. “Rachel shivers with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. How can she think about this sort of thing so glibly? Is that what trauma does to you?”

— Adrian McKinty