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John Banville Quotes

John Banville quote from classy quote

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 their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

~ John Banville

John Banville Acceptance Death Grief Immortality Life Goes On Loss Memory Mourning Sorrow

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

~ John Banville

John Banville Death Emptyness Fear Human

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

~ John Banville

John Banville Banville Fiction Novel Sea

Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say a shocking, realization. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet.

~ John Banville

John Banville Irish Writers John Banville Literature

Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back time and bring the dead to life? None. None possible, not in the real world. And yet in my imaginings I can clearly see this cleansed new creature steaming up out of myself like a proselyte rising drenched from the baptismal river amid glad cries.

~ John Banville

John Banville Atonement Dreams Forgiveness Forgiveness Quotes Ghosts Imagination John Banville Past Regret Regrets Time

The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.

~ John Banville

John Banville Death Loneliness Loss

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

~ John Banville

John Banville Grief Mourning

Although it was autumn and not summer the dark-gold sunlight and the inky shadows, long and slender in the shape of felled cypresses, were the same, and there was the same sense of everything drenched and jewelled and the same ultramarine glitter on the sea. I felt inexplicably lightened; it was as if the evening, in all the drench and drip of its fallacious pathos, had temporarily taken over from me the burden of grieving.

~ John Banville

John Banville Grief Mourning Vivid Weather

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.

~ John Banville

John Banville Emotional Vision Environmental Sadness Fen Landscape Loneliness Marsh Sadness

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

~ John Banville

John Banville Self Self Discovery Soul

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

~ John Banville

John Banville Memories Past

We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. That first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two spent cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing.

~ John Banville

John Banville Memories Past Reflections

You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.

~ John Banville

John Banville God S Love Languor Longing Memories

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

~ John Banville

John Banville Survival

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

~ John Banville

John Banville Characters Writers On Writing Writing

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, 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

John Banville Aging

Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.

~ John Banville

John Banville Dawn Gods

When I look back all is flux, without beginning and flowing towards no end, or none that I shall experience, except as a final full stop. The items of flotsam that I choose to salvage from the general wreckage—and what is a life but a gradual shipwreck?—may take on an aspect of inevitability when I put them on display in their glass showcases, but they are random; representative, perhaps, perhaps compellingly so, but random nonetheless.

~ John Banville

John Banville Life Life And Death

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

John Banville Drinking

When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way.

~ John Banville

John Banville Memories Good Great

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

~ John Banville

John Banville Doubt Everything Full

You know, artists don't really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience that we do have.

~ John Banville

John Banville Life Small Know

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

~ John Banville

John Banville Time Memory Real
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