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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
233513f	Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.		gods	John Banville
732f042	I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone.			John Banville
73c7fd1	At first it had no name. It was the thing itself, the vivid thing. It was his friend. On windy days it danced, demented, waving wild arms, or in the silence of evening drowsed and dreamed, swaying in the blue, goldeny air. Even at night it did not go away. Wrapped in his truckle bed, he could hear it stirring darkly outside in the dark, all the long night long. There were others, nearer to him, more vivid still than this, that came and went..			John Banville
d4ef93c	When you have once seen the chaos, you must make some thing to set between yourself and that terrible sight; and so you make a mirror, thinking that it shall be reflected the reality of the world; but then you understand that the mirror reflects only appearances, and that reality is somewhere else, off behind the mirror; and then you remember that behind the mirror there is only the chaos.			John Banville
906bd0c	If that child dreaming by the wireless had been asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, what I had become was more or less what he would have described, in however halting a fashion, I am sure of it. This is remarkable, I think, even allowing for my present sorrows. Are not the majority of men disappointed with their lot, languishing in quiet desperation in their chains?			John Banville
bbe6276	This, I told myself, this is the way I shall be condemned to pass my days, turning over words, stray lines, fragments of memory, to see what might be lurking underneath them, as if they were so many flat stones, while I steadily faded.			John Banville
f95d27c	Together they will spend a happy hour seated side by side..., while Ivy's tender hand guides Duffy's as he traces out laboriously, in pencil, over and over until he has them off pat, the magic letters of his name. More than the wedding itself, that little ceremony there under the lamp, all silent save for the soft scratching of graphite on paper, will mark the true beginning of their life together.		letters love wedding	John Banville
6f4b503	From earliest days I wanted to be someone else. The injunction nosce te ipsum had an ashen taste on my tongue from the first time a teacher enjoined me to repeat it after him. I knew myself, all too well, and did not like what I knew. Again, I must qualify. It was not what I was that I disliked, I mean the singular, essential me--although I grant that even the notion of an essential, singular self is problematic--but the congeries of affect..			John Banville
7486894	Recordais como era abril cuando eramos jovenes, esa sensacion de liquida impetuosidad y el viento extrayendo cucharadas azules del aire y los pajaros fuera de si en los arboles que ya habian echado brotes?			John Banville
f068f50	Oh, by the way, the plot: it almost slipped my mind. Charlie French bought my mother's pictures cheap and sold them dear to Binkie Behrens, then bought them cheap from Binkie and sold them on to Max Molyneaux. Something like that. Does it matter? Dark deeds, dark deeds. Enough.			John Banville
f244548	I often ask myself whether my decision to pursue a life of scholarship -- if decision is the right word -- was a result of an essential poverty of the soul, or if the desiccation which I sometimes suspect is the one truly distinguishing mark of my scholarship was an inevitable consequence of that decision.			John Banville
21890e2	Que tienen esos momentos intemporales que luego siempre se recuerdan con una dulce melancolia? A veces me parece que es en esos intervalos de vacio, sin que fuera consciente de ello, cuando he vivido de manera mas real y autentica.		philosophy-of-life	John Banville
1ee4b68	I have ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, is slips and fluffs, will be done with and that the real drama for which I have ever and with earnestness been preparing will at last begin. It is a common delusion... Yet I anticipate an apotheosis of some kind, some grand climacteric. I am not speaking her..			John Banville
a01864d	zashchoto spomenite mnogo d'rzhat da s'otvetstvat nap'lno i bezpogreshno na otnovo posetenite mesta i neshcha ot minaloto.			John Banville
39431bd	Chaos is nothing but an infinite number of ordered things.			John Banville
298d17f	Dvamata biakha bliznatsi... kogato se prestrashikh da pomolia Khloe da mi razkazhe s'vsem otkroveno, zashchoto mnogo iskakh da uznaia kak se chuvstva chovek , kakvo predstavliava tova s'stoianie na neizbezhna blizost ... tia se zamisli za mig ... - Kato dva magnita - taka kaza, - no otk'm obratnata strana, privlichat se i se otbl'skvat.			John Banville
3fd8ea2	There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me think of twilight and mists and dead maidens. Tonight it tinkled in my mouth like secret laughter.			John Banville
f76c676	Yes, another April; in a way, in this story, it is always April.			John Banville
0b1bf25	I too could go, oh, yes, at a moment's notice I could go and be as though I had not been, except that the long habit of living indisposeth me for dying,			John Banville
b060dd5	There is in me, deep down, as there must be in everyone-at least, I hope there is, for I would not wish to be alone in this-a part that does not care for anything other than itself. I could lose everything and everyone and that pilot light would still be burning at my centre, that steady flame that nothing will quench, until the final quenching.			John Banville
7264c46	Where did this absurd rule come from, and why did we so meekly obey it? Under a tyrannical regime--and the Ireland of those days was a spiritual tyranny--the populace becomes so cowed that it does the state's work for it voluntarily. And as every tyrant knows, a people's own self-censorship is the kind that works best. In the 1990s, when revelations of clerical sexual abuse and the Catholic Church's cover-ups put an end to its hegemony almo..		self-censorship tyranny	John Banville
c7a3d51	Imagenes del pasado remoto se agolpan en mi cabeza, y la mitad de las veces soy incapaz de distinguir si son recuerdos o invenciones. Tampoco es que haya mucha diferencia, si es que hay alguna. Hay quien afirma que, sin darnos cuenta, nos lo vamos inventando todo, adornandolo y embelleciendolo, y me inclino a creerlo, pues Madame Memoria es una gran y sutil fingidora. Los pecios que elijo salvar del naufragio general --?y que es la vida, si..			John Banville
40c0abc	Estas cosas son faciles de decir, pues las palabras no sienten verguenza y nunca se sorprenden (14) Imagenes del pasado remoto se agolpan en mi cabeza, y la mitad de las veces soy incapaz de distinguir si son recuerdos o invenciones. Tampoco es que haya mucha diferencia, si es que hay alguna (14) Hay quien afirma, que sin darnos cuenta, nos lo vamos inventando todo, adornandolo y embelleciendolo, y me inclino a creerlo, pues Madame Memoria ..			John Banville
a2b2ad4	I am old now, or oldening ...			John Banville
3409edb	I am like the Census," he said, "broken down by age, sex and religion."			John Banville
11b6244	all frail sufferers from the same disease that affected me, all ailing bibliomanes being treated for addiction, as in a literary methadone clinic...			John Banville
0e64cfd	Lately I had been finding it hard to understand the simplest things people said to me, as if what they were speaking in were a form of language I did not recognise; I would know the words but could not assemble them into sense.			John Banville
28d83f1	The big rippled sheets of glass were taken out of their sacking and lowered from the back of the wagon, and for a few giddy moments a troupe of rubbery dwarves and etiolated giants shimmied and shivered in those depthless caskets. of light.			John Banville
9c4b5ac	It was not a wave but a smooth rolling swell that seemed to come up from the deeps, as if something vast down there had stirred itself.			John Banville
9300a90	How is it that in childhood everything new that caught my interest had an aura of the uncanny, since according to all the authorities the uncanny is not some new thing but a thing known returning in a different form, become a revenant?			John Banville
b4b88c4	He liked to bewilder his pupils, it was a form of tyranny.			John Banville
0fb21b1	O my friends!- to be queer was very bliss. The fifties was the last great age of queerdom. All the talk now is of freedom and pride (pride!), but there young hotheads in their pink bell-bottoms, clamouring for the right to do it in the streets if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to wish to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear			John Banville
ca0b792	Remember what April was like when we were young, that sense of liquid rushing and the wind taking blue scoops out of the air and the birds beside themselves in the budding trees?			John Banville
43b5959	In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind. If you are going to write about me, you must resign yourself to that.			John Banville
b3329f0	The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend.			John Banville
8a9c278	Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it. For			John Banville
5f2dca1	In this new life I am condemned to, is there nothing that is not open to doubt?			John Banville
79fbae5	Tendo a non fare molto caso alle altre persone - l'ho gia detto in precedenza, e uno dei miei difetti piu gravi - e nelle rare occasioni in cui metto la testa fuori dal guscio e do una bella occhiata, quello che mi colpisce in modo strabiliante non e quanto siano diversi da me, ma quanto siano simili, malgrado tutto.			John Banville
99c3590	Espionage has something of the quality of a dream. In the spy's world, as in dreams, the terrain is always uncertain. You put your foot on what looks like solid ground and it gives way under you and you go into a kind of free fall, turning slowly tail over tip and clutching onto things that are themselves falling. This instability, this myriad-ness, that the world takes on, is both the attraction and terror of being a spy. Attraction, becau..			John Banville
6cceaf4	I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said.			John Banville
a2138f0	Years ago, he shaved off his beard, without telling her, just appeared at the breakfast table one morning with half his face missing, or so it seemed to her in the first, shocked moment of seeing him. If she had met him in the street she would not have recognised him, except for his eyes. How strange he looked, grotesque, almost, with those indecently naked cheeks and the chin flat and square like the blunt edge of a stone axe. It was as if..		beardless coma razor	John Banville
eec34e7	It has always seemed to me a disgrace that the embarrassments of early life should continue to smart throughout adulthood with undiminished intensity. Is it not enough that our youthful blunders made us cringe at the time, when we were at our tenderest, but must stay with us beyond cure, burn marks ready to flare up painfully at the merest touch? No: an indiscretion from earliest adolescence will still bring a blush to the cheek of the nona..			John Banville
a5087f0	Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much more than a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.			John Banville
8427a55	This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant.			John Banville

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