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Exlpore more Family quotes

"All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

"Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit."

"Marriage creates one world for your child. For that alone, two old friends can try to see a peaceful world through the eyes of their angels."

"Could it be? Samantha Kingston? Home? On a Friday? I roll my eyes. "I don't know. Did you do a lot of acid in the sixties? Could be a flashback. "I was two years old in 1960. I came too late for the party. He leans down and pecks me on the head. I pull away out of habit. "And I'm not even going to ask how you know about acid flashbacks. "What's an acid flashback? Izzy crows. "Nothing, my dad and I say at the same time, and he smiles at me."

"...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues."
Explore more quotes by 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."

"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."

"The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book."

"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."

"I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts."

"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."

"Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners."

"I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television."

"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."
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