Quotes from Deirdre Madden

I had been here during heavy rain, the kind of rain that becomes pleasurable to watch because it makes of the house a haven. The rooms in which one moves become a world apart from the wet streets, the sodden garden.

I realize that a certain school of thought says that who we are is something we construct for ourselves. We build ourselves out of what we think we remember, what we believe to be true about our life; and the possessions we gather around us are supposedly a part of this, that we are, to some extent what we own.

Dark feelings can become a habit. And if they're strong enough, like many strong feelings, they can even be enjoyable.

Sometimes the most important and powerful element is an absence, a lack, a burnished space in your mind that glows and aches as you try to fill it.

I write about subectivety-and inarticulation-about life pushing you into a state where everything is melting until you're left with the absolute and you can find neither the words nor the images to express it.

Rejection only made the attachment stronger. I realized that the impossibility of connection was a driving force behind his desire.

I suppose what's similar about being on actor and being a priest is a certain perception of time. Eternity is a priest's business. But we all live in time. And what I'm doing is trying to make people aware of how the two coexist. That's what religion is, keeping that sense of eternity while being in time; trying to live accordingly. The Kingdom of God is here, now. That's what that's all about.

Being able to understand it was of no great importance. We see no visions because we live in an age in which they are not permitted; but if we accepted the idea of them, who's to say what we wouldn't see? Marriage is no longer a mystical union but a social contract.

It was strange that someone whose need to worship was so intense could be so dismissive of religion.

I had been here during heavy rain, the kind of rain that becomes pleasurable to watch because it makes of the house of a haven. The rooms in which one moves become a world apart from the wet streets, the sodden garden.

The one thing Andrew couldn't do for his son was to protect him from what he himself was, from the strange evolution and deep grief of his own life.

In the apprehension of art there can be a loneliness, as there so often is in its creation. This breaching of loneliness may be the secret of what an audience is, or at least one of its secrets.

Nobody could fathom the suffering the troubles had brought people, and all the terrible things that had happened.

I watched plays with the kind of voracity with which small children read books; with the same visceral passion, the same complete trust in the imagination which is so difficult to sustain through the course of one's whole life.

Touching the scar, quickly, so that no one ever realised that she was doing it, restored a sense of reality, a sense of who she was, in a way that looking at her own reflection could not.

Cate stared intently at the land, as if trying to wring some knowledge from it, as if she were seeing it for the first time, although in fact it couldn't have been more familiar to her, the type of landscape against which she still judge all others.

On the outskirts of Antrim there were alright houses where Union Jacks and Ulster flags were hanging out for the Twelfth of July, even though it was only mind June.

It reminded her of the visceral, uncomprehending emotional closeness that had bound them together over dinners of baked beans and fish fingers eaten at that same table when they were small children.

Cate felt that just by looking at them, people might have guessed that something was wrong, that something had frightened them; and that fear was like a wire which connected them with each other and isolated them from everyone else.

It is a kind of geisha containment, a shutteredness, a withdrawal and negation. It's as if she is capable of sensing when people are on the point of knowing who she is and she sends them a subliminal denial.

remember that a person might do bad things ut that that didn't mean they were a bad person

But this was the first occasion I had come across someone for whom art was a means of avoiding reality rather than confronting it head on, an idea so strange to me that I didn't fully comprehend it at the time.

Everything we suffer has been suffered before, everything that gives us joy has been enjoyed before. Nothing is new: but that doesn't make it any easier to suffer.

Something within her, calm and apparently rational, was thinking that it was impossible for her to continue living without him, that she needed him as she needed air. She did not believe that she could bear the loneliness of being in this world without him.