Top 200 John Boyne Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You’re my best friend, Shmuel,’ he said. ‘My best friend for life.”

— John Boyne

2. “I think i’m just breathing, that’s all. And there’s a difference between breathing and being alive.”

— John Boyne

3. “Bruno: We’re not supposed to be friends, you and me. We’re meant to be enemies. Did you know that?”

— John Boyne

4. “Just because a man glances up at the sky at night does not make him an astronomer, you know.”

— John Boyne

5. “What exactly was the difference? he wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?”

— John Boyne

6. “Some things are just sitting there, waiting to be discovered. Other things are probably better off left alone.”

— John Boyne

7. “The dot that became a speck that became a blob that became a figure that became a boy.”

— John Boyne

8. “And that’s the end of the story about Bruno and his family. Of course all this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again. Not in this day and age.”

— John Boyne

9. “You reach a point where you realize that your life must go on regardless. You choose to live or you choose to die. But then there are moments, things that you see, something funny on the street or a good joke that you hear, a television program that you want to share, and it makes you miss the person who’s gone terribly and then it’s not grief at all, it’s more a sort of bitterness at the world for taking them away from you.”

— John Boyne

10. “Their lost voices Must continue to be heard.”

— John Boyne

11. “A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face.”

— John Boyne

12. “Bruno had a pain in his stomach and he could feel something growing inside him, something that when it worked its way up from the lowest depths inside him to the outside world would either make him shout and scream that the whole thing was wrong and unfair and a big mistake for which somebody would pay one of these days, or just make him burst into tears instead.”

— John Boyne

13. “A home is not a building or a street or a city or something so artificial as bricks and mortar. A home is where one’s family is...”

— John Boyne

14. “There’s things that happen in a person’s life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there’s no forgetting them.”

— John Boyne

15. “It’s not easy losing someone,” she said. “It never goes away, does it?” “The Phantom Pain, they call it,” I said. “Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.”

— John Boyne

16. “Aus-Wisch?”, fragte Bruno, “Was ist ein Aus-Wisch?”

— John Boyne

17. “I’ve always felt that the Catholic Church has the same relationship to God as a fish has to a bicycle.”

— John Boyne

18. “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.’ UMBERTO ECO.”

— John Boyne

19. “Sitting around miserable all day won’t make you any happier.”

— John Boyne

20. “Bruno: Why do you wear pajamas all day? Shmuel: The soldiers. They took all our clothes away. Bruno: My dad’s a soldier, but not the sort that takes people’s clothes away.”

— John Boyne

21. “Well you’ve been brought here against your will, just like I have. If you ask me, we’re all in the same boat. And it’s leaking.”

— John Boyne

22. “Maybe there were no villains in my mother’s story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing.”

— John Boyne

23. “Very slowly he turned his head back to look at Shmuel, who wasn’t crying anymore, merely staring at the floor and looking as if he was trying to convince his soul not to live inside his tiny body anymore, but to slip away and sail to the door and rise up into the sky, gliding through the clouds until it was very far away.″ -The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.”

— John Boyne

24. “But still there are moments when a brother and sister can lay down their instruments of torture for a moment and speak as civilized human beings and Bruno decided to make this one of those moments.”

— John Boyne

25. “Father laughed, which upset Bruno even more; there was nothing that made him more angry than when a grown-up laughed at him for not knowing something, especially when he was trying to find out the answer by asking questions.”

— John Boyne

26. “They sat there in ascending order of age and stupidity.”

— John Boyne

27. “He had never felt so ashamed in his life; he had never imagined that he could behave so cruelly. He wondered how a boy who thought he was a good person really could act in such a cowardly way towards a friend.”

— John Boyne

28. “In his heart, he knew that there was no reason to be impolite to someone, even if they did work for you. There was such a thing as manners after all.”

— John Boyne

29. “Fences such as the one at the heart of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas still exist; it is unlikely that they will ever fully disappear. But whatever reaction you have to this story, I hope that the voices of Bruno and Shmuel will continue to resonate with you as they have with me. Their lost voices must continue to be heard; their untold stories must continue to be recounted. For they represent the ones who didn’t live to tell their stories themselves.”

— John Boyne

30. “It reminds me of how grandmother always had the right costume for me to wear. You wear the right outfit and you feel like the person you’re pretending to be.”

— John Boyne

31. “Of course all this happened a long time ago. And nothing like that could happen again, not in this day and age.”

— John Boyne

32. “It’s so unfair, I don’t see whij I have to be stuck over here on this side of the fence where there’s no one to talk to and no one to play with and you get to have dozens of friends are probably playing for hours every day, I’ll have to speak to Father about it.”

— John Boyne

33. “Anything is possible,’ I said. ‘But most things are unlikely.”

— John Boyne

34. “You look like a Greek God sent down by the immortal Zeus from Mount Olympus to taunt the rest of us inferior beings with your astonishing beauty, I said, which somehow in translation came out as “you look fine, why?”

— John Boyne

35. “When he closed his eyes, everything around him just felt empty and cold, as if he was in the loneliest place in the world. The middle of nowhere.”

— John Boyne

36. “Just don’t ever tell yourself that you didn’t know... That would be the worst crime of all.”

— John Boyne

37. “It is possible, you know, to drift off to an unknown world and find happiness there. Maybe even more happiness than you’ve ever known before.”

— John Boyne

38. “But there was something about the new house that made Bruno think that no one ever laughed there; that there was nothing to laugh at and nothing to be happy about.”

— John Boyne

39. “Collars, trench coats or jackboots – uniforms allow us to exercise our cruelty without ever feeling guilt.”

— John Boyne

40. “He put his face to the glass and saw what was out there, and this time when his eyes opened wide and his mouth made the shape of an O, his hands stayed by his sides because something made him feel very cold and unsafe.”

— John Boyne

41. “I don’t drink coffee,” she said, taking a sip from her tea. “Coffee is for Americans and Protestants. Irish people should drink tea. That’s how we were brought up after all. Give me a nice cup of Lyons and I’m content.” “I don’t mind the occasional cup of Barry’s myself.” “No, that’s from Cork.”

— John Boyne

42. “Please don’t embarrass yourself by offering an opinion.”

— John Boyne

43. “You were such a sweet boy when you first came here. Is it really that easy for the innocent to be corrupted?”

— John Boyne

44. “Is it really that easy for the innocent to be corrupted?”

— John Boyne

45. “I’ve spent so much time pushing the boat out that I forgot to jump on and now it’s out beyond the harbour on the high seas, but it’s very nice to look at.”

— John Boyne

46. “But what about school?’ said Bruno, interrupting her, a thing he knew he was not supposed to do but which he felt he would be forgiven for on this occasion. ‘And what about Karl and Daniel and Martin? How will they know where I am when we want to do things together?”

— John Boyne

47. “I hope he didn’t suffer too much.” “He did,” she said. “But he was very stoical about it. It’s those of us who are left behind who’ll have to suffer now.”

— John Boyne

48. “I was dropped by my publisher after my first two books. But I always believed in myself.”

— John Boyne

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

49. “What you know about women,” replied Maude, “could be written in large font on the back of a postage stamp and there’d still be room for the Lord’s Prayer.”

— John Boyne

50. “I was a very quiet child, quite introverted, really. Independent, yes; I didn’t need a lot of supervision. Less so than I did when I got older, maybe. But I was a bookish child, not surprisingly. I could sit quite happily in a corner for hours and entertain myself with books.”

— John Boyne