Life & Wisdom Quote by John McGahern

McGahern’s line lands with the quiet shock of someone admitting he’s time-traveled without moving. “A different century” isn’t nostalgia as lifestyle branding; it’s a compressed autobiography from a writer who came of age in an Ireland still governed by parish authority, social silence, and the hard limits placed on women, sexuality, and artistic life. He wrote from inside that moral weather system, and he paid for it: his early work was censored, and he lost a teaching job. When he says he “grew up” in a different century, he’s pointing to how recently that world existed, and how thoroughly it shaped the reflexes you carry even after the laws and attitudes start to loosen.

The second sentence is where the real subtext lives. “I think most of them are changes for the good” is modest on the surface, almost understated to a fault, but that understatement is an ethical stance. McGahern refuses both the easy romance of the past and the cheap triumphalism of the present. “Most” is a carefully placed hedge: progress is real, but it’s not a clean narrative, and it doesn’t erase loss. Communities thin out; old rituals vanish; privacy and patience get harder to defend. Yet he won’t pretend the old order was benign just because it was familiar.

It works because it’s not a slogan; it’s a temperament. McGahern is registering modernization as lived experience: relief mixed with dislocation, gratitude tempered by the knowledge that history doesn’t change you overnight.