Unraveling Oliver Quotes
"Time does not heal. It is a lie. One just gets used to the wound."
"Nothing is fair in love and life, and I have wasted far too much of my time wishing it were not so."
"Friends are just people who remind you of your failings."
"I knew, partly from a purple-faced biology teacher and partly from filthy innuendo disseminated by the other boys, that women bled regularly, and it seemed disgusting to me."
"It was clear to me that nobody had ever broached her second line of defense."
"I was, naturally, interested in sex, but I regarded boys with girlfriends as rather suspicious."
"I have never felt the same passion for Alice that I had for Laura, but until three months ago we made a very good life together."
"Homosexuality in Ireland wasn’t decriminalized until 1993."
"It occurs to me now that they may have been lovers. I have snapshots of catching them awkwardly together in my mind, but no matter."
"My father was something of a legendary figure in the entire region."
"But looking at the potential gene pool in the village, I could not think of anybody who I would want as a father to my child."
"We were completed by him, Papa and me. I had not realized how much I needed my boy until I had him and tried to think of life without him."
"Stepping out of the closet was liberating, and there was no way I could go back."
"The fire and its devastating consequences made me realize that life was too short to spend any part of it in denial of the truth."
"I was self-conscious about being the object of their pity, or admiration, or whatever it was."
"I didn’t want him around and yet you don’t really want to hurt him or for him to come to any harm."
"In the macho world of an all-boys’ boarding school, there was no room for sentimentality or sympathy."
"The church condemned us, and yet there were other things going on that the church was ignoring."
"I don’t know if it was my sexuality, my relationship to Laura, or the fact that I reminded him of death that caused the distance between us."
"I spent most of my life trying to impress a man who more or less refused to acknowledge my existence."
"I realized quickly that I couldn’t live with this kind of disturbance."
"I was not sure how to feel about this news. I wasn’t sad, certainly; maybe a little relieved."
"Financially, we were comfortably off but lived sensibly without being austere."
"I was raised as an only child, doted on by both parents."
"Both of my parents were religious, my father maybe more so than my mother."
"I was a serious boy, quiet and contemplative and generally obedient."
"My father had been a priest before he met my mum."
"Early on I learned that if I wanted forgiveness, I must ask for it."
"I enjoyed the rituals, and, unlike most children, for me Easter was a bigger event than Christmas."
"I did not want to get away from a cold and callous bastard like him."
"Truth can cause more pain than lies, I think. Some secrets are best left as secrets."
"What kind of a man is Oliver to have done such a thing?"
"Perhaps Oliver was trying to make a family out of mine. Who knows? He is just a thief."
"My life had been organized with military precision. I had become institutionalized in my years at boarding school."
"I loved her, I thought. Maybe if we had stayed in Dublin that summer, everything would have turned out differently."
"I knew for sure that I could not go back to the school, nor had I the temperament for teaching."
"I tried to humor Laura, promising that I would devote the next night to her, but I rarely kept those promises."
"A family was more seductive than anything she could offer me, although I continued to sleep with her because, after all, a man has needs."
"My task was to write up all these stories in some expensive leather-bound books he had bought for the purpose. It was to be our secret."
"I was enjoying myself with my two companions, and on several occasions I was invited to dine with the family."
"I was headed for the lowest rung of the civil service, without the all-important contacts that everybody else seemed to have."
"I was just about putting one foot in front of the other, going through the motions of empathy and sympathy, but I felt nothing at all."
"I had deliberately lied to Madame Véronique, but these stories were all I had left of those two precious souls and I couldn’t relinquish them."
"You don’t have to love a person. You can love the idea of a person."
"I realized something I had failed to notice for the last thirty years. You don’t have to love a person. You can love the idea of a person."