Roddy Doyle The Van Quotes

#1. I swooned the first time I saw Charlo. I actually did. I didn't faint or fall on the floor but my legs went rubbery on me and I giggled. I suddenly knew that I had lungs because they were empty and collapsing. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#2. It often seemed that the trees were flu of people whispering
especially tonight. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#3. When you grow up on an island, what matters is how you stand to the sea. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#4. I wouldn't go out of my way to experience the indignity of middle-age just because it might be good meat for a story. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#5. She'd tried her hand at most things, but drew the line at honesty. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#6. There were days when I didn't exist; he saw through me and walked around me. I was invisible. There were days when I liked not existing. I closed down, stopped thinking, stopped looking ... There were days when I couldn't even feel pain. They were the best ones. I could see it happening. There was no ground under me, nothing to fall to. I was able to not care. I could float. I didn't exist #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#7. Head in the book. Nose sliding down the valley between the pages. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#8. Fuck was the best word. The most dangerous word. You couldn't whisper it. Fuck was always too loud, too late to stop it, it burst in the air above you and fell slowly right over your head. There was total silence, nothing but Fuck floating down. For a few seconds you were dead, waiting for Henno to look up and see Fuck landing on top of you. They were thrilling seconds-when he didn't look up. It was a word you couldn't say anywhere. It wouldn't come out unless you pushed it. It made you feel caught and grabbed you the minute you said it. When it escaped it was like an electric laugh, a soundless gasp followed by the kind of laughing only forbidden things could make, an inside tickle that became a brilliant pain, bashing at your mouth to be let out. It was agony. We didn't waste it. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#9. Some of the people who look the most normal are probably the maddest people trying to look normal. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#10. If you are a writer you're at home, which means you're out of touch. You have to make excuses to get out there and look at how the world is changing. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#11. If you were going to be best friends with anyone - Kevin - you had to hate a lot of other people, the two of you, together. It made you better friends. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#12. I cried, a bit, as a spoke to Belinda on my mobile phone, in a quiet corner, perhaps the only quiet corner in Jaipur. I told her how I'd hoped Paul would read the forward, that he'd read how much I admired his work and how much I admired him, how much I just plain liked him and loved him. But, even as I spoke, I knew: Paul had always known that. He'd seen in on my face every time we met. What made me cry was the obvious, stupid fact that we'd never meet again. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#13. She's a pot-of-tea-before-I-say-boo-to-you woman. There's always a pile of warm teabags in the sink when I come down, like what a horse would leave behind. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#14. I've been asked why does Ireland produce so many great musicians, and the answer is it doesn't. When you count the great musicians Ireland has given the world in the last 20 years, you can do it on one hand. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#15. I live on an island called Ireland where most of the music is shite. I grew up listening to "Danny Boy"; I grew up hating Danny Boy, and all his siblings and his granny. "The pipes, the pipes are caw-haw-hawing." Anything with pipes or fiddles or even - forgive me, Paul - banjos, I detested. Songs of loss, of love, of going across the sea; songs of defiance and rebellion - I vomited on all of them. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#16. -I love yeh, son, said Jimmy Sr.
He could say it and no one could hear him, except young Jimmy, because of the singing and roaring and breaking glasses.
-I think you're fuckin' great, said Jimmy Sr.
-Ah fuck off, will yeh, said Jimmy Jr. -Packie saved the fuckin' penalty, not me.
But he liked what he'd heard, Jimmy Sr could tell that. He gave Jimmy Sr a dig in the stomach.
-You're not a bad oul' cunt yourself, he said. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#17. Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph, until you get to page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety - it's the job. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#18. It's the only thing sexier than a sexy woman. A sexy woman cooking fuckin' sausages. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#19. And even the aches and pains that had joined her as she got older
she'd liked them. They were reminders
the back, the knee, the achy wrists
they were even friends: Feel that now, Emer. You're alive. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#20. She was in the book again and, by the time she got to page-turning time again, she'd forgetting I was there. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#21. When I'm writing I just think there's only the page and me and nobody else. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#22. They ran. They stayed warmer that way and running seemed to be the right way to measure their love for Uncle Ben. They wanted to hear their breath, and their feet stamping the ground. They wanted to feel their lungs working, and their hearts. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#23. It's a big con job. We have sold the myth of Dublin as a sexy place incredibly well; because it is a dreary little dump most of the time. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#24. She's happier than Nicola. That's probably true. Alcoholics can stop drinking but what is there for the children of alcoholics? Is it always too late? Probably. She doesn't know. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#25. He loved me and he beat me. I loved him and I took it. It's as simple as that, and as stupid and complicated. It's terrible. It's like knowing someone you love is dead but not having the body to prove it. He loved me. I know it. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#26. The problem with being Irish ... is having 'Riverdance' on your back. It's a burden at times. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#27. Four generations of women
"I'm a woman," Mary said to herself
heading off on a journey in a car. One of the dead, one of them dying, one of the driving, one of them just staring out. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#28. Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
[Ten rules for writing fiction, The Guardian, 20 February 2010 (with Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, and AL Kennedy)] #Quote by P.D. James

#29. I remember I wanted to get away; I wanted to run. I couldn't stand any more. But I didn't want to run. I wanted everything to be perfect; everything was going to be great - I just had to be careful. I was responsible for it all. The clouds coming, I was dragging them towards us; my thoughts were doing it. I was ruining everything. It was up to me. I could control the whole day. All I had to do was make sure that I made no stupid mistakes. Don't walk on the cracks. Don't look at the clouds. It's up to you. #Quote by Roddy Doyle

#30. When I have a model who is quiet and steady and with whom I am acquainted, then I draw repeatedly 'til there is one drawing that is different from the rest, which does not look like an ordinary study, but more typical and with more feeling. #Quote by Vincent Van Gogh

#31. To the majority of those on the job his presence had been magical. Years afterward, the wife of one of the steam-shovel engineers, Mrs. Rose van Hardevald, would recall, "We saw him ... on the end of the train. Jan got small flags for the children, and told us about when the train would pass ... Mr. Roosevelt flashed us one of his well-known toothy smiles and waved his hat at the children ... " In an instant, she said, she understood her husband's faith in the man. "And I was more certain than ever that we ourselves would not leave until it [the canal] was finished." Two years before, they had been living in Wyoming on a lonely stop on the Union Pacific. When her husband heard of the work at Panama, he had immediately wanted to go, because, he told her, "With Teddy Roosevelt, anything is possible." At the time neither of them had known quite where Panama was located. #Quote by David McCullough

#32. I never want her to know that fatherhood was the ambition of my life. #Quote by Simon Van Booy

#33. Indeed, I cannot think why the whole bed of the ocean is not one solid mass of oysters, so prolific the creatures seem. Ah, I am wandering! Strange how the brain controls the brain! What was I saying, Watson? #Quote by Arthur Conan Doyle

#34. The past and the present are within my field of inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer. #Quote by Arthur Conan Doyle

#35. If chaos is a necessary step in the organization of one's universe, then I was well on my way. #Quote by Wendelin Van Draanen

#36. The Swiss current of Reformed theology of Francis Turretin and Johann Heinrich Heidegger differed from the French approach exemplified by the Academy of Saumur. The northern German Reformed line of Bremen or of the Middle-European Herborn Academy differed from that of the Franeker theologians in the tradition of William Ames. At Leiden, the Cocceian or federalist approach was not identical with the Voetian project at Utrecht. Likewise, the British variety of Reformed theology (John Owen, Richard Baxter), with all its diversity, and the several types of Reformed teaching on the Continent each had an emphasis of their own. Methodologically, this means that we no longer can canonize Geneva, or contrast a non-scholastic Calvin with the later scholastic Calvinists as if they represented a uniform movement. #Quote by Willem J. Van Asselt

#37. I am at peace. And I understand that I am in the middle of a reunion with God. This is a returning of my soul to its source. My soul's source is God, and God is love. I am, right at this moment, in perfect love with God and there is no fear in perfect love. #Quote by Glennon Doyle Melton

#38. The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies. #Quote by Willard Van Orman Quine

#39. We should not try to understand God from what we think we know about love, but rather we should strive to understand love in the light of who God is. #Quote by Benno Van Der Toren

#40. Belgium may not have had the imperial might of Germany. Belgium may not have been blessed with the same level of industrial prowess. Belgium certainly didn't have the same manpower. But what the Battle of Liege did manage to showcase to the Allies, Europe and the rest of the world, was that if you had the stomach for battle, a strong enough motive to succeed and an irrevocable love for one's country, these factors alone could drive you to an outcome in the realms of the impossible. #Quote by Daniel Van Basten