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6b8423f
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Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.
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death
friendship
life
love
inspirational
wwii-fiction
tear-jerker
holocaust
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John Boyne |
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28471c7
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A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart's invisible furies on his face.
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John Boyne |
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9093f77
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The last image I had of her was her sitting on the platform at Thorpe as a group of people stared at this distressed, weeping woman, and then her charging towards the glass of my window seat as the train pulled out of the station. I had gasped, thinking she meant to throw herself under the wheels, but no, she had simply wanted to attack me, that was all. If she had got her hands on me, she might have killed me. And I might have let her.
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John Boyne |
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b11bab6
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The first thing he noticed was how quiet it was. This was nothing like the kind of quiet he heard when he woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. When that happened, there were always strange, unidentifiable sounds seeping into his room from the tiny gaps where the windowpanes weren't sealed together correctly. At those moments he could always tell there was life outside, even if all that life was fast asleep. It was a silence..
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John Boyne |
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81c69a0
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Of course all this happened a long time ago. And nothing like that could happen again, not in this day and age.
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John Boyne |
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92ce6d7
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He reaches over, takes my face in his hands and pulls me to him. In my idle moments, imagining such a scene, I have always assumed that it would be the other way round, that I would reach for him and he would pull away, denouncing me as a degenerate and a false friend. But now I am neither shocked nor surprised by his initiative, nor do I feel any of the great urgency that I thought I would, should this moment ever come to pass. Instead, it..
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John Boyne |
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abb1ee3
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When I make mistakes I get punished,' insisted Bruno, irritated by the fact that the rules that always applied to children never seemed to apply to grown-ups at all (despite the fact that they were the ones ho enforced them).
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John Boyne |
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5ae0d27
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From the introduction "After all, the great joy of literature, as opposed to politics or religion, is that it embraces differing opinions, it encourages debate, it allows us to have heated conversations with our closes friends and dearest loved ones. And through it all, no one gets hurt, no one gets taken away from their homes, and no one gets killed."
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difference-of-opinion
oinions
debate
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John Boyne |
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ac5f19c
|
I think this was a bad idea,' he repeated. 'I think the best thing to do would be to forget all about this and just go back home. We can chalk it up to experience,
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John Boyne |
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ceb07e0
|
Don't you ever think,' he asked cautiously, 'that it would be better to be a bully than to be bullied? At least that way no one could ever hurt you.' Katarina turned to him in amazement. 'No,' she said definitively, shaking her head. 'No Pieter, I never think that, not for a moment.
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violence
doubt
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John Boyne |
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c97e16d
|
And shortly after that the blob became a figure. And then, as Bruno got even closer, he saw that the thing was neither a dot nor a speck nor a blob nor a figure, but a person.
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John Boyne |
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88a9de5
|
It's the countryside. Perhaps this is our holiday home.
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John Boyne |
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755d735
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He had never felt so ashamed in his life; he had never imagined that he could behave so cruelly. He wondered how a boy who thought he was a good person really could act in such a cowardly way towards a friend.
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John Boyne |
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b8a6bfb
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There were others, such as Jack London,who offered their readers such a respite from the miserable horror of existence that their books were like gifts from the gods. (Character of Tristan Sadler in "the Absolutist")"
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John Boyne |
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fe127a2
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I turned to leave and was exiting the gates when I heard the sound of feet running quickly along the gravel behind me. I turned and saw Alexei, who showed no sign of slowing down, so I opened my arms and he ran into them, embracing me tightly, his arms wrapped around my neck as I lifted him off the ground. "I wanted you to know," he said, his voice choked up as if he was trying to stop himself from crying, "I wanted you to know that you can..
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romanov
john-boyne
the-house-of-special-purpose
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John Boyne |
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8de8e56
|
Other things are probably better off left alone. Like a dead mouse at the back of a cupboard.
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John Boyne |
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395b6e9
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Father laughed, which upset Bruno even more; there was nothing that made him more angry than when a grown-up laughed at him for not knowing something, especially when he was trying to find out the answer by asking questions.
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John Boyne |
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b137f0c
|
How can something still feel so painful after twenty-eight years, I asked myself. Is there no recovery from the traumas of our youth?
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John Boyne |
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e2ae560
|
La ninez se mide a traves de sonidos, olores y suspiros, antes de que aparezca la sombra obscura de la razon. (John Betjeman)
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razón
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John Boyne |
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0503175
|
I had never considered myself to be a dishonest person, hating the idea that I was capable of such mendacity and deceit, but the more I examined the architecture of my life, the more I realized how fraudulent were its foundations. The belief that I would spend the rest of my time on earth lying to people weighed heavily on me and at such times I gave serious consideration to taking my own life.
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John Boyne |
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2b9f249
|
Look at me Pieter", she said. He looked up tears in his eyes. "Don't ever pretend that you did not know what was going on here. You have eyes and you have ears. And you sat in that room on many occasions, taking notes. You heard it all. You saw it all. You knew it all. And you also know the things you are responsible for." She hesitated, but it needed to be said. "The deaths you have on your conscience. But you're a young man still; you're ..
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John Boyne |
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8d48596
|
You were never a real Avery," he hissed. "You know that, don't you?" "I do," I said. "But Christ on a bike, you came close. You came damned close." --
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John Boyne |
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68cb86e
|
Neither your mother nor I have any imagination at all and we certainly didn't bring you up to have one
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parents-and-children
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John Boyne |
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d56b476
|
Answer me!'Shouted Lieutenant Kotler. 'Did you steal something from that fridge?' 'No, sir. He gave it to me,'said Shmuel, tears welling up in his eyes as he throw a sideways glance at Bruno. 'He's my friend,'he added.
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John Boyne |
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0852f32
|
What you know about women," replied Maude, "could be written in large font on the back of a postage stamp and there'd still be room for the Lord's Prayer. For all your"
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John Boyne |
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a439495
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I may not have known much about pregnancies but I knew that you couldn't have a son or a daughter without actually doing it first. The priests at school had once muttered something to the effect that when a mummy and a daddy loved each other very much, they lay close together and the Holy Spirit descended upon them to create the miracle of new life. (Charles, in his one attempt at a man-to-man talk with me, had put it rather differently. 'G..
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John Boyne |
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1ba5893
|
What exactly was the difference? he wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pyjamas and which people wore the uniforms?
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John Boyne |
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1ebea80
|
When he closed his eyes, everything around him just felt empty and cold, as if he was in the loneliest place in the world. The middle of nowhere.
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John Boyne |
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69c92de
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Bruno had a pain in his stomach and he could feel something growing inside him, something that when it worked its way up from the lowest depths inside him to the outside world would either make him shout and scream that the whole thing was wrong and unfair and a big mistake for which somebody would pay one of these days, or just make him burst into tears instead.
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John Boyne |
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cc35351
|
In that direction only pain lies.
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John Boyne |
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6459ebf
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Do you think . . . ?" 'I do sometimes, my boy,'admitted the old man. 'When I can't avoid it."
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John Boyne |
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014a3fe
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There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them. John Boyne April 28, 1789: The real-life mutiny that inspired John Boyne's novel, Mutiny on the Bounty, took place aboard the HMS Bounty 224 years ago today. Half the ship's crew, seduced by several months of good life on Tahiti, rose up against Captain William Bligh. Some of the mutineers' descendant..
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John Boyne |
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ec64986
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If it wasn't for the fact that Bruno was nowhere near as skinny as the boys on his side of the fence, and not quite so pale either, it would have been difficult to tell them apart. It was almost (Shmuel thought) as if they were all exactly the same really.
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John Boyne |
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a30c14f
|
Seated opposite me in the railway carriage, the elderly lady in the fox-fur shawl was recalling some of the murders that she had committed over the years.
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opening-lines
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John Boyne |
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3f0fc57
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The notion that he had a life outside our life, outside our friendship, was deeply hurtful to me.
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John Boyne |
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d3f3dfc
|
Just because someone looks sky at night, doesn`t mean it is astronaut.
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John Boyne |
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840dd4c
|
It has always astonished me, Georgy Daniilovich, that those who are most repulsed by autocratic or dictatorial rule are among the first to eliminate their enemies once they take on the mantle of power themselves.
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john-boyne
the-house-of-special-purpose
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John Boyne |
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48c8fed
|
I like 'fresh fruit flan'," said the donkey. "Three excellent words." "I don't have one," said Noah immediately before the question could even be asked, and the donkey opened his eyes wide in suprise, and for a moment Noah wondered whether he might even consider eating him."
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John Boyne |
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841e073
|
Collars, trench coats or jackboots - uniforms allow us to exercise our cruelty without ever feeling guilt.
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John Boyne |
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5b4fc6d
|
You are not there, Father," I cried. "I wake up at Gaudlin Hall, I spend most of my day there, I sleep there at night. And throughout it all there is but one thought running through my mind." "And that is?" "This house is haunted."
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thriller
|
John Boyne |
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f279763
|
The sensation that for the world to exist with an object of such beauty in it--and for that object to be unattainable--was the very sweetest kind of pain imaginable.
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loneliness
love
desire
|
John Boyne |
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440f323
|
You're a bit of an oddball, Jonathan,' I said. 'Has anyone ever told you that?' 'Nineteen people this year alone,' he said. 'And it's only May.
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John Boyne |
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fe3a7cf
|
These were colours he'd never ever seen before; ones he couldn't possibly begin to name. Here, to his left, was a wooden clock, and it was painted, well not exactly green, but a colour that green might like to be if it had any imagination at all. And over there, beside the wooden board game whose overriding colour was not red, but something that red might look at enviously, blushing with embarrassment at its own dull appearance. And the woo..
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John Boyne |
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6e58ef5
|
A home is not a building or a street or a city or something so artificial as bricks and mortar. A home is where one's family is...
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John Boyne |