Top 200 John Boyne Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I felt that this must be what it would be like to be married to someone, a constant back and forth of bickering, watching out for any stray comment in a conversation that might be corrected, anything to keep gaining the upper hand, the advantage, bringing one closer to taking the game, the set and the whole blasted match without ever ceding a point.”

— John Boyne

102. “Please don’t let Julian die, I asked God. And please stop me from being a homosexual. Only when I stood up and walked away did I realize that that had been two prayers, so I went back and lit a second candle, which cost me another penny.”

— John Boyne

103. “He held it out to Maude, who leaned forward, keeping her eyes locked on his as the cigarette began to spark, and then she sat back again, her left hand poised on the mattress behind her. She continued to stare at him before turning her face towards the ceiling and blowing a great cloud of white smoke in the air, as if she was preparing to announce the election of a new Pope.”

— John Boyne

104. “The sensation that for the world to exist with an object of such beauty in it – and for that object to be unattainable – was the very sweetest kind of pain imaginable.”

— John Boyne

105. “Every man is afraid of women as far as I can see.”

— John Boyne

106. “For a moment he considered running across the platform to tell people about the empty seats in the carriage, but he decided not to as something told him that if it didn’t make Mother angry, it would probably make Gretel furious, and that would be worse still.”

— John Boyne

107. “You know, Emily Dickinson is here too. All she does is write poems about life all the time. The irony! She keeps asking me to read them. I refuse, of course. The days are long enough as it is.”

— John Boyne

108. “And I am not one of these long-living fictional characters who prays for death as a release from the captivity of eternal life; not for me the endless whining and wailing of the undead.”

— John Boyne

109. “I didn’t blow anyone!’ he roared. ‘If anyone was getting blown it was me. Although, of course, it wasn’t me anyway, as it never happened.’ ‘That’s a great quote,’ said Mr Denby-Denby. ‘We should definitely put that into the press release. I don’t blow teenage boys. They blow me.”

— John Boyne

110. “The same thing that’s happened.”

— John Boyne

111. “It was a difficult time to be Irish, a difficult time to be twenty-one years of age and a difficult time to be a man who was attracted to other men. To be all three simultaneously required a level of subterfuge and guile that felt contrary to my nature.”

— John Boyne

112. “I need to get back to the office. Those windows won’t stare out themselves all afternoon.”

— John Boyne

113. “He knew that sometimes people who were sad didn’t want to be asked about it; sometimes they’d offer the information themselves and sometimes they wouldn’t stop talking about it for months on end, but on this occasion Bruno thought that he should wait before saying anything.”

— John Boyne

114. “I was deluding myself, for love was one thing but desire was something else entirely.”

— John Boyne

115. “You’ve heard the wonderful news, I presume?” “No. Has Mr. Trump died?”

— John Boyne

116. “He wore the headdress of a Red Indian and was making the sounds to match, a terrible howling that would have given a deaf man a headache.”

— John Boyne

117. “I married up several times. And then across once or twice. And then beneath me. I never quite found the right level somehow. Perhaps I should have married diagonally or in a slightly curved direction.”

— John Boyne

118. “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.” “You should. It’s magnificent. Shakespearean in its characterization.”

— John Boyne

119. “A chest out to here and legs that go all the way down to the floor.”

— John Boyne

120. “I’m not praying,” she said. “I’m remembering. Sometimes the two things look alike, that’s all.”

— John Boyne

121. “I had told the truth, or a version of it, anyway.”

— John Boyne

122. “We even shared a young man from time to time. Oh don’t look so shocked, Cyril. It was the 1930s, people were a lot more evolved then than they are today.”

— John Boyne

123. “After all, the clamour of the crowded public house is infinitely more welcoming than the stillness of the empty home.”

— John Boyne

124. “But for all that we had, for all the luxury to which we were accustomed, we were both denied love, and this deficiency would be scorched into our futures lives like an ill-considered tattoo inscribed on the buttocks after a drunken night out, leading each of us inevitably toward isolation and disaster.”

— John Boyne

125. “The moral of the story’, he repeated, leaning forward and placing his hands flat on the desk in front of him, ‘is that every so often a natural disaster comes along, an act of God, and it blows all the dust away and when it does people can see that whatever’s left underneath ain’t so pretty. You get it?’ Denton.”

— John Boyne

126. “La experiencia es la madre de la ciencia.”

— John Boyne

127. “The notion that he had a life outside our life, outside our friendship, was deeply hurtful to me.”

— John Boyne

128. “Sure the priests ran the country back then and they hated women. Oh my God, they hated women and anything that had to do with women and anything to do with women’s bodies or ideas or desires, and any chance that they had to humiliate a woman or bring her down, they would take full advantage of it.”

— John Boyne

129. “I blame Charles Dickens for the death of my father’.”

— John Boyne

130. “She opened her mouth to say something, but when she did she realized that she couldn’t find any words to express her surprise, and so she did the only sensible thing she could think of and closed it again.”

— John Boyne

131. “I never really noticed it any more, in the way that one often ignores familiar things, like seat cushions or loved ones.”

— John Boyne

132. “I would have dearly liked to close the French doors between us for a bit of peace, but Mam wouldn’t allow it; she said that solitude would give me ideas and the last thing a boy of my age needed was ideas.”

— John Boyne

133. “The gods would never allow such a perverse outcome, would they? I am divine. My place is on the mountaintop with Jupiter, Mars and Apollo.”

— John Boyne

134. “A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt had once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face. He looked a hundred years old. He looked like a man who had died several months earlier. He looked like a soul in pure torment.”

— John Boyne

135. “I stood up and offered not a prayer, for that was of no use to anyone, but a moment of contemplation.”

— John Boyne

136. “Don’t we all hope for some form of immortality? We might not be able to breathe forever but there are other ways to stay alive.”

— John Boyne

137. “Natuurlijk gebeurde dit allemaal heel lang geleden en kan zoiets nu niet meer gebeuren. Niet in onze tijd.”

— John Boyne

138. “The suggestion, however, regarding my age – that I am perhaps not quite fifty years old – would flatter me immensely. For it is many years now since I have been able to say in all honesty that I have only seen half a century. This is simply the age, or at least the visual representation of an age, at which I have been stuck for a large proportion of my 256 years of life. I am an old man.”

— John Boyne

139. “How can something still feel so painful after twenty-eight years, I asked myself. Is there no recovery from the traumas of our youth?”

— John Boyne

140. “It’s not so long ago that men of your ilk believed in witches and superstition,” I pointed out. “Medieval times,” he said, waving a hand in the air to dismiss the notion. “This is 1867. The Church has come a long way since then.”

— John Boyne

141. “I’d rather bore a hole to the center of the earth with my tongue.”

— John Boyne

142. “I felt as if I might laugh out loud. It was an extraordinary way to refer to six years of war, countless millions of deaths, and all the broken places that had been left behind.”

— John Boyne

143. “If Dr. Allenby thought she had any concept of what guilt was, then she was fooling herself. Guilt was what kept you awake in the middle of the night or, if you managed to sleep, poisoned your dreams. Guilt intruded upon any happy moment, whispering in your ear that you had no right to pleasure. Guilt followed you down streets, interrupting the most mundane moments with remembrances of days and hours when you could have done something to prevent tragedy but chose to do nothing.”

— John Boyne

144. “The night was warmer than most I had known; we could breathe without seeing clouds of unpoken words dissolving into the atmosphere before us.”

— John Boyne

145. “I suppose you wish you’d won the war.” I raised an eyebrow. “Oh, Mr. Darcy-Witt,” I said, as if I were explaining something obvious to a child. “No one wins a war.”

— John Boyne

146. “You are most welcome,’ replied Hitler. ‘But remember, the boy who wears this uniform must obey our rules and seek nothing more from life than the advancement of our party and our country. That is why we are here, all of us. To make Germany great again.”

— John Boyne

147. “La tonta de remate.”

— John Boyne

148. “A man was standing at the end of the hallway, just outside an open door, from where a great light shone, illuminating him almost as a god.”

— John Boyne

149. “I sat down again, wishing I had never been brought here. It was as if I had walked onstage into the middle of a dramatic play, where the other characters are already engaged in a battle that has been going on for some years but which only now, upon my arrival, is allowed to reach a climax.”

— John Boyne

150. “Maude’s way of dealing with Charles was to treat him like an ottoman, of no use to anyone but worth having around.”

— John Boyne