Цитаты из книги At Swim, Two Boys

“You asked me earlier were there many of us about. The question for my friend was, were there any of us at all. The world would say that we did not exist, that only our actions, our habits, were real, which the world called our crimes or our sins. But Scrotes began to think that we did indeed exist. That we had a nature…

“Which tales are these now?” “Don’t ask me. The Holy Band of Thesbians.” “Of Thebes,” said MacMurrough. “The Sacred Band.” “All lovey-dovey dying together. Don’t you know he’s dippy over you? He takes anything you say at face. That’s a kid you’re telling that to. He don’t know it’s stories.” “Doyler, he’s the same age as…

“I miss him, aye,” he said. “He was pal o’ me heart, so he was. I try not to think of him, only I can’t get him off my mind. He’s with me always day and night. I do see him places he’s never been, in the middle of a crowd I see him. His face looks out from the top of a tram, a schoolboy wouldn’t pass but I’m thinking it’s…

“We’ll be asked to fight for Ireland, sure I know that.” “But what is Ireland that you should want to fight for it?” “Sure I know that too.” He raised a shoulder, his head inclined then turned: an attempt to shrug shake and nod, all the same time. When he was shy or self-conscious of something he would say, his body would…

He saw the black water and the declining sun and the swan dipping down, its white wings flashing, and slowing and slowing till silver ripples carried it home. It was a scene which seemed the heart of this land. The lowing sun and the one star waking, white wings on a black water, and the smell of rain, and the long lane…

MacMurrough shifted his gaze from the thick spittle-wet mouth and stared instead through the garden windows. What a dreary drunk he was. He recalled the Spartan custom of inebriating slaves that young men should see how contemptible was drunkenness. Nowadays we leave it to our leshishlashors.

—Help these boys build a nation their own. Ransack the histories for clues to their past. Plunder the literatures for words they can speak. And should you encounter an ancient tribe whose customs, however dimly, cast light on their hearts, tell them that tale; and you shall name the unspeakable names of your kind, and in…

The people shall further be graded according to wealth, and—humorous touch this—the more obviously a man labor, the more stinting shall be his reward; the more he work in the out-of-doors, the thinner his clothing shall be; the more his labor filthy him, the less water shall he have to wash.