John Boyne Quotes

We were so wholly one I had not thought That we could die apart. I had not thought That I could move,—and you be stiff and still! That I could speak,—and you perforce be dumb! I think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof In some firm fabric, woven in and out; Your golden filaments in fair design Across my duller fibre.

What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you. Okay.

In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.

I think that one of the reasons why people look towards the end of humanity is that people are afraid to die alone. If you die alone, the people you love will miss you, or if they die, you miss them - the sorrow is inevitable. When you truly love someone, the thought of losing them forever is horrible.

Ever since I can remember feeling love for my parents, I've been frightened of losing them.

Next door, there's an old man who lived to his nineties and one day passed away in his sleep. And his wife, she stayed for a couple of days and passed away. I'm sorry, I know that's a strange way to tell you that I know we belong.

Everything that we love will, at some point, be taken away from us. If I think about everyone I love eventually being taken away from me by death, or simply by getting lost from each other in the world, it makes me value them much more now.

As I sit here writing and look across the room at Janice, I keep thinking of the most heartbreaking question: which of us will go first?

Your skin upon my skin, in the beating of our hearts, may the living let us in, before the dead tear us apart.

In this vast country that he had so loved, he was alone.

As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

Maybe we're grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive.

When Mother died I was both freed and abandoned, as are we all at this profound juncture in our lives.

Love is transient even on a very personal level. We lose everyone that we love. Sometimes we drift apart and sometimes we die.

That's the one thing you wake up with every day: How long have I got left? And that's the saddest thing in the world, because you have this absolute realization that everything you love you're going to have to let go of and give up. I look at my daughter and I think, There's going to be a point where I'm not going to be around for her. Even the thought of that breaks my heart.

I wish you could invent some means to make me at all happy without you. Every hour I am more and more concentrated in you; everything else tastes like chaff in my mouth.

Because death is the only thing that could have ever kept him from you.

Lines I die but when the grave shall press The heart so long endeared to thee When earthy cares no more distress And earthy joys are nought to me. Weep not, but think that I have past Before thee o'er the sea of gloom. Have anchored safe and rest at last Where tears and mouring can not come. 'Tis I should weep to leave thee here On that dark ocean sailing drear With storms around and fears before And no kind light to point the shore. But long or short though life may be 'Tis nothing to eternity. We part below to meet on high Where blissful ages never die.

I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

If suddenly you do not exist, If suddenly you are not living, I shall go on living. I do not dare, I do not dare to write it, if you die. I shall go on living.

I saw my own blood and I thought, how could I live in a world where this exists- where love can become death?

At last, Lady Evenstar, fairest in this world, and most beloved, my world is fading. Lo! we have gathered, and we have spent, and now the time of payment draws near." 'Arwen knew well what he intended, and long had foreseen it; nonetheless she was overborne by her grief. "Would you then, lord, before your time leave your people that live by your word?" she said.

Never has grief been possessed, never has love been learned, and what removes us in death is not revealed.