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afb85d7
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When I look back, no matter how hard I try I can see clear break between one phase and another. It is a seamless flow - although flow is too strong a word. More a sort of busy stasis, a sort of running on the spot. Even that was too fast for me, however, I was always a little way behind, trotting in the rear of my own life. In Dublin I was still the boy growing up at Coolgrange, in America I was the callow young man of Dublin days, on the i..
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John Banville |
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b9ca164
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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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John Banville |
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2237bb9
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Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquillity, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.
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John Banville |
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c83afea
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Her own mother had died when Anna was twelve and since then father and daughter had faced the world like a pair of nineteenth-century adventurers, a riverboat gambler, say, and his alibi girl.
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John Banville |
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c304280
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I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.
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loneliness
sadness
environmental-sadness
fen
marsh
landscape
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John Banville |
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5dbb3d4
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Yet even without saying, each knew what the other was thinking, and, more acutely, what the other was feeling -- this is a further effect of our shared sorrow, this empathy, this mournful telepathy.
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John Banville |
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7160fa4
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At thee seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky.
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the-sea
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John Banville |
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e40fdfb
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He made the mistake of imagining that his possessions were a measure of his own worth, and strutted and crowed, parading his things like a schoolboy with a champion catapult.
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John Banville |
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e61870d
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Whom now would I love, and who would love me?
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John Banville |
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315ded5
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a thief's heart is an impetuous organ, and while inwardly he throbs for absolution, at the same time he can't keep from bragging.
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John Banville |
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4f5e4ba
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Happy sadness, sad happiness, the story of my life and loves
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John Banville |
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163dc2e
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A married couple never seem so married as when viewed from the back seat of a motor car, talking quietly together in the front. Polly and Marcus might have been in their bedroom already, so soft and intimate their converse sounded to me, as I sat there alertly mute behind the backs of their heads
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John Banville |
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ef0e798
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Let us say, the present is where we live, while the past is where we dream.
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John Banville |
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57f2c60
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There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not anymore. Now I'm startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Halloween mask made of sagging, pinkish- grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly ret..
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look-in-the-mirror
getting-old
reflections
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John Banville |
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f628a01
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I make my voyage out, far, far out, to the very brim, where a disc of water shimmers like molten coin against a coin-colored sky, and everything lifts, and sky and water merge invisibly. that is where I seem to the most at ease now, on the far, pale margin of things. If I can call it ease. If I can call it being
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John Banville |
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0dc745f
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What is my purpose here? I may say, I just sat down to write, but I am not deceived. I have never done anything in my life that did not have a purpose, usually hidden, sometimes even from myself.
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John Banville |
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ea90f32
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What did I brood on, sitting there in the classic pose with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands? We do not need to go to the Greeks, our tragic predicament is written out on rolls of lavatory paper.
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John Banville |
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13c9343
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bh rGm hmhy tlsh w zHmt m`mrn, TrHn w mdyrn, tqhy htlh hmyshh b by Sbry ntZr drd khh m msfrn brwym, tqhy bymrstn br`khs, z m mykhwhd khh bmnym w qn` bshym.
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بیمارستان
هتل
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John Banville |
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6456cc9
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And anyway, who's to say that what we see when we're drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria
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John Banville |
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f8aad4c
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The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.
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loneliness
loss
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John Banville |
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8e11d17
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Tal vez el amor no nace ahi, no en un repentino arrebato de passion, sino en el reconocimiento y la sencilla aceptacion de, de algo que no se que es
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John Banville |
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89a5aaa
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She had that look - scared and sort of paralysed but frantic underneath - that girls got when they could think of only the one thing. It was a look that told him it would be her first time.
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John Banville |
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d4739f7
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Do other people, remembering their parents, feel, as I do, a sense of having inadvertently done a small though significant, irreversible wrong?
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John Banville |
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3cec387
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But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all? We
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John Banville |
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9934875
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What age is she now, twenty something. I'm not sure. She is very bright, quite the bluestocking. Not beautiful, however, I admitted that to myself long ago. I cannot pretend this is not a disappointment, for I had hoped that she would be another Anna. She is too tall and stark, her rusty hair is coarse and untameable and stand out around her freckled face in an unbecoming manner, and when she smiles she shows her upper gums, glistening and ..
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no-he-didn-t
wow
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John Banville |
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44721ef
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of her blood. Oh, I do not say these are
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John Banville |
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8a82aff
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We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
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John Banville |
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1e8e005
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But why at least? What a business it is, the human discourse. I
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John Banville |
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244844f
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No wlasnie, przedmioty potrafia przetrwac, a zywi tymczasem znikaja.
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John Banville |
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3632176
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Przeszlosc bije we mnie niczym drugie serce.
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John Banville |
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b21f954
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A wiec, panie doktorze - odezwala sie troche za glosno, radosnym, zdecydowanym tonem gwiazdy filmowej z lat czterdziestych - to wyrok smierci czy dozywocie?
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life-sentence
diagnosis
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John Banville |
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8b77c11
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Na milosc boska, nie histeryzuj! - odburknela. - Po prostu umieram, koniec kropka.
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John Banville |
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eb38487
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Encline aux verites qui tuent, elle n'avait nulle intention de blesser.
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John Banville |
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8548a22
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Byc moze cale zycie jest zaledwie dlugim przygotowaniem do chwili, w ktorej sie z nim rozstajemy.
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life
end-of-life
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John Banville |
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a357280
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ubezhdenieto, koeto nie vsichki khranim na tazi v'zrast, che semeistvata na nashite priiateli sa mnogo simpatichni, po-priiatni i interesni - s edna duma, po-zhelani, - otkolkoto nashite sobstveni?
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John Banville |
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b52746e
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Quello che accade non ha importanza; il momento e tutto. Questo e il mondo d'oro. Il pittore ha radunato il suo piccolo gruppo di persone e le ha poste in questa radura agitata dal vento, in questa delicata luce artificiale, dipingendole come angeli e pagliacci. E un mondo dove niente e perduto, dove di tutto e dato conto pur se il mistero delle cose e preservato; un mondo dove essi possono vivere, per quanto brevemente, per quanto tenuamen..
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John Banville |
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f1c4a82
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Sto leggendo Diderot anche riguardo agli attori e alla recitazione. Lui sapeva quanta vita passiamo a recitare una parte. Concepiva la vita come una forma di ipocrisia necessaria, in cui ciascuno recita la sua parte, fingendo di essere se stesso. E vero. Che altro sono mai stato se non un attore, seppur un cattivo attore, troppo coinvolto nel mio ruolo, non sufficientemente distaccato, non abbastanza freddo. Si, si, e cosi. Mi reputate fred..
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John Banville |
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d84191a
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W mojej pamieci jest swoim wlasnym cieniem. Ktora z nich jest realniejsza, kobieta, ktora rozlozyla sie na trawiastej skarpie moich wspomnien, czy tez ta powloka kurzu i suchy szpik, jedyne jej slady, ktore przechowala ziemia? Na pewno gdzies trwa dla innych, ruchoma figura w gabinecie figur woskowych, jakim jest pamiec, ale ich obraz jest inny niz ten, ktory ja nosze w myslach, a wszystkie roznia sie miedzy soba. W ten sposob czlowiek rozg..
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John Banville |
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2ee7b5b
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Zaden szczegol ludzkiego oblicza nie zniesie dluzszej obserwacji.
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John Banville |
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f0b765d
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Pacjent - powiedziala mi pewnego dnia Anna, juz blisko konca - to dziwne slowo. "Cierpliwy". A ja wcale nie jestem cierpliwa."
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words
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John Banville |
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a4d63cc
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A teraz, juz po wszystkim, cos nowego sie zaczelo, nowego dla mnie - trudna sztuka zycia po smierci.
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mourning
grieving
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John Banville |
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7d21314
|
Pomieszczenie wygladalo tak, jak je zapamietalem. Albo wygladalo, jak gdyby bylo takie, jakim je zapamietalem, gdyz z reguly wspomnienia dopasowuja sie niezauwazalnie do rzeczy i miejsc z odwiedzanej przeszlosci.
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memory
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John Banville |
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7161754
|
To, ze tu jestem, wynika po prostu z potrzeby, zeby nigdzie nie byc.
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John Banville |
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a5548bd
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Bylem zawsze wyrozniajacym sie nikim, ktorego bezwzglednym zyczeniem bylo stac sie niewyrozniajacym sie kims.
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John Banville |