Top 200 John Boyne Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “He looked the boy up and down as if he had never seen a child before and wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to do with one: eat it, ignore it or kick it down the stairs.”

— John Boyne

52. “One day he was perfectly content, playing at home, having three best friends for life, sliding down banisters, trying to stand on his tiptoes to see right across Berlin, and now he was stuck here in this cold, nasty house with three whispering maids and a waiter who was both unhappy and angry, where no one looked as if they could ever be cheerful again.”

— John Boyne

53. “When you sit down with a book, you are separating yourself out of your world for a few hours and getting lost in the story.”

— John Boyne

54. “It was the fact that I didn’t want to kill anyone. I wasn’t put on this earth to murder my fellow man. I’d grown up with violence – can’t you see that? I can’t bear it.”

— John Boyne

55. “He suddenly became convinced that if he didn’t do something sensible, something to put his mind to some use, then before he knew it he would be wondering round the streets having fights with himself and inviting domestic animals to social occasions too.”

— John Boyne

56. “There will be outrage and disgust and people will turn on me at the last, they will hate me, my reputation will forever be destroyed, my punishment earned, self-inflicted like this gunshot wound, and the world will finally know that I was the greatest feather man of them all.”

— John Boyne

57. “He’d always been a handsome man, of course, and his good looks had stayed with him into old age, as they so often do with undeserving men.”

— John Boyne

58. “It’s not easy making a living as a writer, and for many years I worked at a Waterstones in Dublin. It was a good environment for an aspiring writer, with lots of events and authors appearing.”

— John Boyne

59. “Children’s book writers tend to feel quite superior, and adult writers tend to feel they wouldn’t know how to write a children’s book – which might surprise you because I think a lot of people think it’s the other way around.”

— John Boyne

60. “For the first time in my life, I started to think about my own mortality. Should I fall or have a heart attack, I could lie on the kitchen floor decomposing for weeks before anyone thought to come looking for me. I didn’t even have a cat to eat me.”

— John Boyne

61. “My mother was Eveline Hartford,” said Maude, as if this would mean something to one or the other of us. “So as you know, she simply adored chairs.”

— John Boyne

62. “The truth is that I can’t remember a moment when I didn’t want to be a writer. From childhood, I loved books, I loved stories and I loved writing my own.”

— John Boyne

63. “The more you read, the more you write, the more the ideas will appear. They’ll fall like confetti around your head and your only difficulty will be deciding which ones to catch and which to let fall to the floor.”

— John Boyne

64. “War today is such a more visible thing. We see it on television, on CNN. In 1914, war was a concept.”

— John Boyne

65. “There is cruelty in the world Eliza, you can see that, can’t you? It surrounds us. It breathes on us. We spend our life trying to escape it.”

— John Boyne

66. “And I have tried to forget him, I have tried to convince myself that it was just one of those things, but it’s difficult to do that when my body is standing here, eight feet deep in the earth of northern France, while my heart remains by a stream in a clearing in England where I left it weeks ago.”

— John Boyne

67. “Every man is afraid of women as far as I can see,” said Julian, displaying an understanding of the universe far beyond his years. “That’s true,” she said. “But only because most men are not as smart as women and yet they continue to hold all the power. They fear a change of the world order.”

— John Boyne

68. “You have many years ahead of you to come to terms with your complicity in these matters. Just don’t ever tell yourself that you didn’t know.” She released him now from her grip. “That would be the worst crime of all.”

— John Boyne

69. “From the introduction “After all, the great joy of literature, as opposed to politics or religion, is that it embraces differing opinions, it encourages debate, it allows us to have heated conversations with our closes friends and dearest loved ones. And through it all, no one gets hurt, no one gets taken away from their homes, and no one gets killed.”

— John Boyne

70. “I’ve always believed that if women could only collectively harness the power that they have then they’d rule the world.”

— John Boyne

71. “But they’d never once invited any of the striped pyjama people to dinner.”

— John Boyne

72. “I had never considered myself to be a dishonest person, hating the idea that I was capable of such mendacity and deceit, but the more I examined the architecture of my life, the more I realized how fraudulent were its foundations. The belief that I would spend the rest of my time on earth lying to people weighed heavily on me and at such times I gave serious consideration to taking my own life.”

— John Boyne

73. “Seated opposite me in the railway carriage, the elderly lady in the fox-fur shawl was recalling some of the murders that she had committed over the years.”

— John Boyne

74. “Most men are not as smart as women and yet they continue to hold all the power. They fear a change of the world order.”

— John Boyne

75. “I think Maurice is whatever he needs to be, whenever he needs to be it. He’s an operator, that’s for sure.”

— John Boyne

76. “This deficiency would be scorched into our future like an ill-considered tattoo.”

— John Boyne

77. “In school, the other girls formed alliances which always excluded me. They called me names; I will not repeat them here. They made fun of my unshapely body, my pale skin, my untamed hair. I do not know why I was born this way.”

— John Boyne

78. “Accept the situation in which you find yourself and everything will be so much easier.”

— John Boyne

79. “I think that books for young people should have serious and important themes, they shouldn’t be trivial. So the books I write, they would be the kind of stories you would write in an adult novel only they just happen to feature a child at the center of them.”

— John Boyne

80. “There’s nothing more tedious than a grown man blaming his parents, birth or otherwise, for all the things that have gone wrong in his life.”

— John Boyne

81. “I enjoy the research element. There are so many stories from the past that interest me, that I want to learn more about, just as an interested person. And if I’m going to learn, if I’m going to research, it’s probably going to lead me to writing a novel.”

— John Boyne

82. “With the adult ones, I feel I need to get as deep inside the psychology of a character as I can, and that needs to be first-person. In the children’s books, I feel I need some distance. I don’t want to be the nine-year-old at the center of the story. I need to have some type of narrative voice.”

— John Boyne

83. “The people are behind him for now. He has infected them with his hatred. He demands absolute loyalty, and when anyone dares to criticize him, they lose their position. I think he will lead a great army, but what will be the result?”

— John Boyne

84. “The only thing I’d tell Maude, if she was here, is that she runs the risk of sounding a little anti-man at times, don’t you agree? All the husbands in her novels are stupid, insensitive, faithless individuals with murky pasts, empty heads, micro-penises and questionable morals. But I suppose she had a good imagination, as all writers must, and she was simply making things up.”

— John Boyne

85. “Do you watch Neighbors, Cyril?” “Well, I’ve seen it,” I admitted. “Although I wouldn’t go so far as to say I watch it.”

— John Boyne

86. “It’s as if she understood completely the condition of loneliness and how it undermines us all, forcing us to make choices that we know are wrong for us.”

— John Boyne

87. “Hay veces en que le envidio su juventud, pero trato de no pensar mucho en eso. Un anciano no debe tener celos de aquellos que vienen a ocupar su puesto, y recordar el tiempo en que era joven, sano y viril es un acto de masoquismo que no sirve de nada.”

— John Boyne

88. “However, as the consequences of Black Thursday began to settle in investors’ minds, most people attempted to recover their losses and the dramatic selling began again. On Tuesday 29 October, the day of the Wall Street Crash, more than 16 million shares were dumped in an afternoon of trading. On that one single day, as much money was lost on the New York stock exchange as had been spent in its entirety by the US government on fighting the First World War. It was a disaster. Annette.”

— John Boyne

89. “He’s crazy,” Bruno said, twirling a finger in circles around the side of his head and whistling to indicate just how crazy he thought he was. “He went up to a cat on the street the other day and invited her over for afternoon tea.” “What did the cat say?” asked Gretel, who was making a sandwich in the corner of the kitchen. “Nothing.” explained Bruno. “It was a cat.”

— John Boyne

90. “But this was Dublin, the nation’s capital. The place of my birth and a city I loved at the heart of a country I loathed. A town filled with good-hearted innocents, miserable bigots, adulterous husbands, conniving churchmen, paupers who received no help from the State, and millionaires who sucked the lifeblood from it.”

— John Boyne

91. “It occurs to me that even though Zoya and I are both still alive, my life is already over. She will be taken from me soon and there will be no reason for me to continue without her. We are one person, you see. We are GeorgyandZoya.”

— John Boyne

92. “But here’s what you have to remember: There are no homosexuals in Ireland. You might have got it into your head that you are one but you’re just wrong, it’s as simple as that. You’re wrong.”

— John Boyne

93. “Here’s a tip though’, he told me, leaning over and pressing a hand into my shoulder. ‘If you want to improve your time, run faster.”

— John Boyne

94. “Do you see the irony at all, Tristan?’ I stare at him and shake my head. He seems determined not to speak again until I do. ‘What irony?’ I ask eventually, the words tumbling out in a hurried heap. ‘That I am to be shot as a coward while you get to live as one.”

— John Boyne

95. “Situations like that always made Bruno feel very uncomfortable because, 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

96. “Why did they abandon me? Why do we abandon each other? Why did I abandon you?”

— John Boyne

97. “I have always been a lover of the sun, even if, through spending a lifetime in Ireland, I have had little personal connection with it.”

— John Boyne

98. “His position, like so many of his ilk, was one of uncontested and unearned respect.”

— John Boyne

99. “Life is suffering. Until the great day of judgement, when peace and equanimity may be restored for those who are pure of heart and deed.”

— John Boyne

100. “Would there be no end to publishing, he wondered? Perhaps it would be a good idea if everyone just stopped writing for a couple of years, and allowed readers to catch up.”

— John Boyne