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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2237bb9 | 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. | John Banville | ||
| c83afea | 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. | John Banville | ||
| c304280 | 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. | environmental-sadness fen landscape loneliness marsh sadness | John Banville | |
| 5dbb3d4 | 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. | John Banville | ||
| 7160fa4 | At thee seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky. | the-sea | John Banville | |
| e40fdfb | 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. | John Banville | ||
| e61870d | Whom now would I love, and who would love me? | John Banville | ||
| 315ded5 | 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. | John Banville | ||
| 4f5e4ba | Happy sadness, sad happiness, the story of my life and loves | John Banville | ||
| 163dc2e | 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 | John Banville | ||
| ef0e798 | Let us say, the present is where we live, while the past is where we dream. | John Banville | ||
| 57f2c60 | 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.. | getting-old look-in-the-mirror reflections | John Banville | |
| f628a01 | 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 | John Banville | ||
| 0dc745f | 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. | John Banville | ||
| ea90f32 | 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. | John Banville | ||
| 13c9343 | 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. | بیمارستان هتل | John Banville | |
| 6456cc9 | And anyway, who's to say that what we see when we're drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria | John Banville | ||
| 8c3dfae | Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 79bf32f | oh, he loves her; just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly) | Zadie Smith | ||
| e3cacac | Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinema verite, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 554c194 | It is the most ridiculous country in the world, Bangladesh. It is God's idea of a really good wheeze, his stab at black comedy. | Zadie Smith | ||
| d96e4ce | When you are guilty, all you can ask for is a deferral of the judgement. 'Whatever, | Zadie Smith | ||
| be91f67 | It was the season of sex, yes, but it was also, in all the vital ways, without sex itself--and isn't that one useful definition of a happy girlhood? I didn't know or appreciate this aspect of my luck until well into adulthood, when I began to find, in more cases than I would have guessed, that among my women friends, irrespective of background, their own childhood sex seasons had been exploited and destroyed by the misdeeds of uncles and fa.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| e49ab60 | Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he found himself suddenly accosted by some kind of synaesthetic fixation with the woman: hearing the colour of her hair in the mosque, smelling the touch of her hand on the tube, tasting her smile while innocently walking the streets on his way to work; and this in turn led to a knowledge of every public convenience in London, led to the kind of masturbation that even a fifteen-year-old boy living in .. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 0b2e777 | On Beauty No, we could not itemize the list of sins they can't forgive us. The beautiful don't lack the wound. It is always beginning to snow. Of sins they can't forgive us speech is beautifully useless. It is always beginning to snow. The beautiful know this. Speech is beautifully useless. They are the damned. The beautiful know this. They stand around unnatural as statuary. They are the damned and so their sadness is perfect, delicate as .. | poetry | Zadie Smith | |
| cfb2ca3 | This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love. ~ Archie Jones | relationship-quotes | Zadie Smith | |
| ae66aa4 | But I was so much older then," sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, "I'm younger than that now." -- | Zadie Smith | ||
| 638970b | for a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him. | Zadie Smith | ||
| e57b5d3 | I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy's screwy--cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 154485a | What do you want to do Marvin?" croaked Alex, and then coughed the frog out. "Excuse me?" "Apart from being a milk operative. I mean, what do you want to do with you life?" Marvin eloquently groaned, like a disappointed academic, and slapped his own forehead. "I tell you something, yeah? Das an idiot's question, yeah? Life is going to do things to me. And that's all there is. And it's all good. Yogurts?" | Zadie Smith | ||
| 99c89a0 | But like all things, the business has two sides. Clean white teeth are not always wise, now are they? Par exemplum: when I was in the Congo, the only way I could identify the nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth, if you see what I mean. Horrid business. Dark as buggery, it was. And they died because of it, you see? Poor bastards. Or rather I survived, to look at it in another way, do you see? | Zadie Smith | ||
| 469754b | For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost. Though her friends--Merlin, Wan-Si, et al.--clapped her on the back and congratulated her for exorcising those fervid dreams of perdition and redemption, Clara quietly mourned the warmer touch she had waited for these nineteen years, the all-enveloping bear hug of the Savior, the One who was Alpha and Omega, both the beginn.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 7fed3f8 | Most Saturdays, as my own middle passage approached, I accompanied my mother to a protest march of one kind or another, against South Africa, against the government, against nuclear bombs, against racism, against cuts, against the deregulation of the banks or in support of the teachers' union, the GLC or the IRA. The purpose of all this was hard for me to grasp, given the nature of our enemy. I saw her on television most days--rigid handbag.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 59294d2 | The vision Marcia Blake had of these people, and had passed onto her daughter, came tumbling down in a riot of casual blaspheming, weed and cocaine, indolence. Were these really the people for whom the Blakes had always been on their best behaviour? On the tube, in a park, in a shop. Why? Marcia: 'To give them no excuse. | Zadie Smith | ||
| ca1d8ad | Mnostwo zjawisk, ktore dzis okreslamy mianem syndromow, mialo wtedy prostsze nazwy. Czasy byly prostsze. To wlasnie dlatego ludzie mowia o nich "stare, dobre czasy"." | polish sindrome stare-czasy syndrom syndrome | Zadie Smith | |
| cbd08fc | The shit is not the shit, he repeated solemnly, the pigeon is the shit. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 9354667 | People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive | Zadie Smith | ||
| e7638f6 | To look back at all past work induces nausea [...] It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated. | Zadie Smith | ||
| eafcbaa | Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones, who are just there to make up the numbers. Or, worse still, who are given their big break only to come in on cue and die a death right there, center stage, for all to see. | Zadie Smith | ||
| ec06f51 | No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 4048378 | She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 8185727 | though it was such a bizarre world, filled only with the echoing voices of people who had apparently already agreed with each other. | Zadie Smith | ||
| f9e240c | I don't remember the song she sang - I never really liked her songs - but standing in the empty concert hall, listening to her sing without backing music, with no support of any kind, I found that the sheer beauty of the voice, it's monumental dose of soul, the pain implicit within it, bypassed all my conscious opinions, my critical intelligence or sense of the sentimental, or whatever it is that people are referring to when they talk about.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 5b2fb40 | the feeling I had of moving into somebody else's broken ambition. | Zadie Smith |