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5cecca2
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Some people are nice and if you talk to them properly, they can be even nicer." -Rose" --
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Colm Tóibín |
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d56da41
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She felt almost guilty that she had handed some of her grief to him, and then she felt close to him for his willingness to take it and hold it, in all its rawness, all its dark confusion.
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Colm Tóibín |
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832e0cc
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Dreams belong to each of us alone, just as pain does.
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Colm Tóibín |
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3e8c83a
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in skies of deepening blue
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Colm Tóibín |
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8edee27
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She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything. The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there. In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of ..
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Colm Tóibín |
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2429999
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For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.
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foreign
loneliness
outsider
sadness
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Colm Tóibín |
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66411c9
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In the morning, she was not sure that she had slept as much as lived a set of vivid dreams, letting them linger so that she would not have to open her eyes and see the room.
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restlessness
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Colm Tóibín |
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0f65b9d
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Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones.
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Colm Tóibín |
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21f3e6d
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She thought it was strange that the mere sensation of savouring the prospect of something could make her think for a while that is must be the prospect of home.
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thoughts
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Colm Tóibín |
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07b70ff
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Even though she let these thoughts run as fast as they would, she still stopped when her mind moved towards real fear or dread or, worse, towards the thought that she was going to lose this world for ever, that she would never have an ordinary day again in this ordinary place, that the rest of her life would be a struggle with the unfamiliar.
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Colm Tóibín |
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bb6bc7f
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We walk among them sometimes, the ones who have left us. They are filled with something that none of us knows yet. It is a mystery.
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Colm Tóibín |
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1a59d76
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None of them could help her. She had lost all of them. They would not find out about this; she would not put it into a letter. And because of this she understood that they would never know her now. Maybe, she thought, they had never known her, any of them, because if they had, then they would have had to realize what this would be like for her.
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Colm Tóibín |
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569f78d
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It is terrible to be an unprotected being.
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safety
security
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Colm Tóibín |
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b04c1a2
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if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it.
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Colm Tóibín |
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c6daecd
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She would learn how to spend these hours. In the peace of these winter evenings, she would work out how she was going to live.
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Colm Tóibín |
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345cfb5
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I remember too much; I am like the air on a calm day as it holds itself still, letting nothing escape.
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Colm Tóibín |
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be9f4bb
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His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her. What once was life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose.
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love
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Colm Tóibín |
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1e1bd17
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I do not know why it matters that I should tell the truth to myself at night, why it should matter that the truth should be spoken at least once in the world. Because the world is a place of silence, the sky at night when the birds have gone is a vast silent place. Words will make the slightest difference to the sky at night. They will not brighten it or make it less strange. And the day too has its own deep indifference to anything that is..
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Colm Tóibín |
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f2b3c8b
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She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything.
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Colm Tóibín |
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dd6079b
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I like it that they [disciples] feed me and pay for my clothes and protect me. And in return I will do for them what I can, but no more than that. Just as I cannot breathe the breath of another or help the heart of someone else to beat or their bones not to weaken or their flesh not to shrivel, I cannot say more than I can say. And I know how deeply this disturbs them, and it would make me smile, this earnest need for foolish anecdote or sh..
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Colm Tóibín |
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0889865
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Eilis imagined the years ahead, when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more.
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Colm Tóibín |
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1275791
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What she would need to do in the days before she left and on the morning of her departure was smile, so that they would remember her smiling. *
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Colm Tóibín |
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193d05b
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Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep - it can't be done abruptly.
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craft
novels
writing
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Colm Tóibín |
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5b28d60
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Q: What's the biggest myth about writing? A: That there's any wildness attached to it. Writing tends to be very deliberate." [
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deliberate-creation
deliberation
myths
precision
urban-myths
writing
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Colm Tóibín |
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a423937
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She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday. Nothing maybe except sleep, and she was not even certain she was looking forward to sleep. In any case, she could not sleep yet, since it was not yet nine o'clock. There was nothing she could do. It was as though she had been locked away. In
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Colm Tóibín |
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772fd26
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memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain.
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Colm Tóibín |
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7e0e8da
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If water can be changed into wine and the dead can be brought back, then I want time pushed back.
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Colm Tóibín |
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836d88d
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And then it occurred to her that she was already feeling that she would need to remember this room, her sister, this scene, as though from a distance.
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Colm Tóibín |
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d22387a
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Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices. They mean nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea. They meant less than the marl and the mud and the dry clay of the cliff that were eaten away by the weather, washed away by the sea. It was not just that they would fade: they hardly existed, they did not matter, they would have no impact on this cold dawn, this deserted remote seascape where the water shone in t..
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Colm Tóibín |
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f172bc7
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We keep our prices low and our manners high. -Miss Bartocci
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Colm Tóibín |
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cf45053
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The men could be easily distinguished as fellow Americans by the quality of their mustaches and the innocent and amicable expressions on their faces; the several women could only have come from New England, making this clear, he felt, by their willingness to allow their menfolk the right to speak at length while confining their own talk to short and brisk, intelligent interruptions or slightly disagreeable remarks once the men had finished.
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Colm Tóibín |
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6877a40
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In the meantime, when I wake in the night, I want more. I want what happened not to have happened, to have taken another course.
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Colm Tóibín |
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1fec925
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We had used up all of our time. And I wondered if that made any difference to my mother then, as she lay awake in the hospital those last few nights of her life: we had used up all of our time.
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Colm Tóibín |
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3c73622
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Now, she felt that she was being singled out for something for which she was not in any way prepared, and this, despite the fear it carried with it, gave her a feeling, or more a set of feelings, she thought she might experience in the days before her wedding, days in which everyone looked at her in the rush of arrangements with light in their eyes, days in which she herself was fizzy with excitement but careful not to think too precisely a..
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Colm Tóibín |
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2f4e552
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Life is but a day and expresses mainly a single note.
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Colm Tóibín |
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362a974
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But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would ne be disturbed. The gap between these two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bar..
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loneliness
mystery
self
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Colm Tóibín |
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a811894
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The details of what I told him were with me all the years in the same way as my hands or my arms were with me.
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Colm Tóibín |
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e4dbe6d
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He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment. Sometimes the dullness came to the fore with a strange and insistent ache which he would entertain briefly, but learn to keep at bay. Mostly, however, it was the contentment he entertained; the slow ease and the silence could, once night had fallen, fill him with a happiness that nothing, no society nor the company of any..
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solitude
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Colm Tóibín |
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36b60d0
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Eilis was fascinated by [...] his sweet duplicity in giving no sign of what had happened before. She was almost glad to know that he had secrets and had ways of calmly keeping them.
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Colm Tóibín |
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d7f1b7f
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And she wondered then if she herself were the problem reading malice into motives when there was none intended
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Colm Tóibín |
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32c05db
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You learn, no matter what age you are, to keep things to yourself.
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Colm Tóibín |
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70c8409
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The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, . He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that - and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych."
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conceit
critique
diptychs
grandeur
novelists
novels
reviews
self-importance
writers
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Colm Tóibín |
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c2ad504
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Wait until you're old, Nora," she said, "and then you'll know. It's the mixture of being content with even the smallest thing and then feeling a great dissatisfaction with everything."
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Colm Tóibín |
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0ed1b1a
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As they sat at the table, she did not like the girls talking among themselves, or discussing matters she knew nothing about, and she did not encourage any mention of boyfriends. She was mainly interested in clothes and shoes, and where they could be bought and at what price and at what time of the year. Changing fashions and new trends were her daily topic, although she herself, as she often pointed out, was too old for some of the new colo..
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Colm Tóibín |