top of page
Quote_1.png
John McGahern

"Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space."

Standard 
 Customized
"Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space."

Exlpore more Family quotes

Quote_1.png
Amber Hurdle

"If I would be made come to earth again, I would ask for the same mother again. If made to return 100 times to earth, I would request to be born through the same mother 100 times!"

Quote_1.png
Amber Hurdle

"I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars."

Quote_1.png
Amber Hurdle

"So live that you wouldn't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip."

Quote_1.png
Amber Hurdle

"They play in the Meadow. The dancing girl with the dark hair and blue eyes. The boy with blond curls and gray eyes, struggling to keep up with her on his chubby toddler legs. It took five, ten, fifteen years for me to agree. But Peeta wanted them so badly. When I first felt her stirring inside of me, I was consumed with a terror that felt as old as life itself. Only the joy of holding her in my arms could tame it."

Quote_1.png
Amber Hurdle

"It's funny how two people can grow up in the same town, go to the same school, have the same friends, and end up so totally different. Family, or lack of it, counts for more than you'd think."

Quote_1.png
Amber Hurdle

"Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material."

Quote_1.png
Amber Hurdle

"Not a few millions of parents strongly hope that their own children will step in by instantly becoming their own parents' foster parents, if and when the parents reach their second childhood."

Quote_1.png
Amber Hurdle

"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance."

Quote_1.png
Amber Hurdle

"Mother is the center of the family, everyone else surrounds her."

Quote_1.png
Amber Hurdle

"This is a race in a heavily Democratic state that, for a Republican candidate, will require full-time devotion in order to win... I could not be a senator and a father during this campaign. I could only be a candidate."

Explore more quotes by John McGahern

Quote_1.png
John McGahern
"I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world."
Quote_1.png
John McGahern
"Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century."
Quote_1.png
John McGahern
"I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor."
Quote_1.png
John McGahern
"I think there's a great difference in consciousness in that same way in that when we're young we read books for the story, for the excitement of the story - and there comes a time when you realise that all stories are more or less the same story."
Quote_1.png
John McGahern
"The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese."
Quote_1.png
John McGahern
"When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not."
Quote_1.png
John McGahern
"But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader."
Quote_1.png
John McGahern
"I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other."
Quote_1.png
John McGahern
"We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places."
Quote_1.png
John McGahern
"I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy."
bottom of page