Life & Wisdom Quote by John McGahern

McGahern’s line lands like a quiet indictment because it treats “perverted” not as a private kink but as a public moral glitch: a culture that polices intimacy harder than violence has its values upside down. The phrasing matters. “It did occur to me” performs modesty, the tone of a man remembering a dawning recognition rather than delivering a sermon. That restraint lets the accusation bite harder; he’s not grandstanding, he’s describing a sick logic he can’t unsee.

The comparison is deliberately lopsided. “Killing somebody” is framed as bureaucratically normalized - “a minor offence” - while “kissing somebody” is the act that triggers social alarm. McGahern is pointing at the moral bookkeeping of mid-century Ireland: a Catholic-influenced public sphere where sexual behavior, especially outside sanctioned marriage, could bring scandal, ostracism, even institutional punishment, while state and communal violence (from domestic brutality to political conflict) could be absorbed as unfortunate but manageable. The sentence’s power comes from making that hypocrisy sound banal, like a rule everyone has learned to live by.

Subtextually, it’s also about what gets counted as “real harm.” A kiss threatens hierarchy: it’s bodily, egalitarian, hard to regulate, and it exposes desire. Violence, by contrast, can be narrativized as duty, discipline, or “just how things are.” McGahern’s twenties aren’t incidental; they signal the moment when inherited moral scripts stop feeling like truth and start looking like pathology.