Quotes by Paul Murray

Life makes fools of all of us sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and youll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, its our own expectations that crush us.

Life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and youll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, its our own expectations that crush us. -- from Skippy Dies

When you think about it, the Big Bangs a big like school, isnt

Fascinating ... The whole thing [the school dance] seems to work on a similar principle to a supercollider. You know, two streams of opposingly charged particles accelerated till theyre just under the speed of light, and then crashed into each other? Only here alcohol, accentuated secondary sexual characteristics and primitive rock and roll beats take the place of velocity.

It gives the war a whole new dimension, you know, hearing from someone right there in the thick of it. They really connected with it.’‘Maybe it reminds them of school,’ she suggests. ‘Didn’t someone describe the trenches as ninety-nine per cent boredom and one per cent terror?’‘I don’t know about boredom. God, the chaos of it, the brutality. And it’s so vivid. I’d definitely be interested in reading his poetry, if only to see how he can go from describing, you know, people getting their guts blown out, to writing about love.’‘Maybe it’s not that much of a leap,’ she says.

Ariadne made an impression on you, and thats great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and youre left watching somebodys body disintegrate. You start with a love story, you end up manacled to an hourglass, watching the sands run out.

Their faith in him is at once touching and alarming -- their trust that they are safe simply because hes with them, as if an adult presence warded of all possible threat, emanated an unbreachable forcefield.

The importance of humor is primarily to puncture fixed ideas—to make us step back and realize that our situation, whatever it may be, is, in the grand scheme of things, always contingent and arbitrary and ephemeral. And that helps us to deal with our emotions and to keep going. Holding on to one perspective, on the other hand, whether it takes the form of grief or anger or a particular political standpoint, is often destructive to us and to those around us

There’s no escaping it,” he’d been fond of telling us when he was well, “the way you look defines who you are. You might argue for your soul, or your heart, but everyone else in the world will judge you on your big nose or your weak chin. Six billion people could be wrong, but you’ll never get them to admit it.

The stories we read in books, whats presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as its lived today. Im not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, thats the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock youll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyones constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And its - if youll forgive my language - its bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and thats how they like it. They dont transform, they dont stop to smell the roses, they dont sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood - Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people arent waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. Theyre not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel - thats finished.

None of it made any difference. The hollow feeling refused to go away. The next days were very hard. I found myself in the grip of a crippling ennui. I was back at square one, but I couldn’t bring myself to resume my job hunt; it was all I could do to drag myself from the bedroom floor to the sofa. With every passing day my financial affairs grew more ruinous, and it became harder and harder even to conceive of how I might dig myself out of the hole I was in—which only compounded my ennui, and my disinclination to do anything about it.

Never trust an Italian. The Nazis did that, and look where it got them.

I saw myself as reviving a certain mode of life, a mode that had been almost lost: the contemplative life of the country gentleman, in harmony with his status and history. In Renaissance times they had called it sprezzatura. The idea was to do whatever one did with grace, to imbue one’s every action with beauty, while at the same time making it look quite effortless. Thus, if one were to work at, say, law, one should raise it to the level of an art; if one were to laze, then one must laze beautifully. This, they said, was the true meaning of being an aristocrat.

Mrs. P.? Oh no. She’s the help. Bosnian, you know. Or is it Serbian? An absolute treasure, anyway. As I always say to Bel, if there’s one good thing to come out of all this fuss in the Balkans, it’s the availability of quality staff . . .” The words died away on my lips: once again I found myself trailing off in the stare of those unblinking eyes. This fellow was like some kind of after-dinner black hole. My anxiety began to mount again.

I decided I would teach Mrs. P. a lesson by cooking my own meal.

You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone Give me the gun, etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyones asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they dont mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg - that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride youd imagined,that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of life.

I only meant, you know, you shouldn’t be wasting your time on imbeciles. I know how hard it is to find the right person, but that’s no reason to exhaustively work your way through all the wrong people. You seem to be living your romantic life by some kind of process of elimination. It’s like matching a Louis Quatorze armchair with one of those plastic patio tables. It simply doesn’t work.” “Oh, I see,” Bel said. “I’m an armchair, is that it?” “A Louis Quatorze armchair,” I qualified. “And my boyfriends are patio tables.” “Actually,” I remembered, “this one’s more like one of those self-assembly Swedish wardrobes.

When I came to again—parched, pain rampaging through my intestines—I was in my bed. The little bedside lamp illuminated two anxious faces, my sister’s and Mrs. P.’s (the latter looking a shade guilty, I noted, no doubt realizing that it was effectively through her negligence that I had been forced to poison myself) [. . .] “I think he has eaten many kidney beans.” Mrs. P. shuddered. “Many kidney beans not cooked.” “Beans!” I cried again deliriously. “Oh for heaven’s sake,” Bel said. “Charles, listen carefully, did you soak the beans before you cooked them?” “Of course I didn’t soak them,” I said. “What are you talking about?

I believe his lies, so he believes mine. She turns and looks at me straight on. Thats how it goes at the end of love.

People dont want the truth, he says, waving a hand at the streets around us. They want better-quality lies. High definition lies on fifty-inch screens.