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John McGahern

"My father was very outwardly religious."

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"My father was very outwardly religious."

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Akiroq Brost

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

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Akiroq Brost

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

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Akiroq Brost

"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!"

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Akiroq Brost

"You don't build a family by tearing down another one."

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Akiroq Brost

"It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are."

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Akiroq Brost

"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."

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Akiroq Brost

"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."

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Akiroq Brost

"Doubt is the brother of shame."

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Akiroq Brost

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

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Akiroq Brost

"...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

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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."
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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."
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John McGahern
"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."
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John McGahern
"Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church."
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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."
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John McGahern
"I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts."
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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."
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John McGahern
"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."
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John McGahern
"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."
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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."
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