Quotes from banville john ii

Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think.

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

Of all the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally.

He comes to them in disguise, tricks himself out as a bull, an eagle, a swan, or, as in the present case, a husband, and thinks to make them love him--him, that is, and not what or who he is pretending to be, as if he were a mortal just like them. Ah, yes, love, what they call love, it drives him to distraction, for it is one of that pair of things our kind may not experience, the other being, obviously, death.

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously clichéd business.

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.

First day of the new life. Very strange. Feeling almost skittish all day. Exhausted now yet feverish also, like a child at the end of a party. Like a child, yes: as if I had suffered a grotesque form of rebirth.

What is it about the past? I can never understand it. Why is it so powerful? Why does it appeal to us as if it had some extraordinary pearl of meaning that we can't find in our present lives?

When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally.

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 in 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.

We're all the people in our books. A few people who read Eclipse in manuscript said that they felt almost embarrassed because it seemed to be so personal. I suppose, in a way, it should be gratifying but I find it puzzling. I certainly didn't set out to write about myself. Physically, I'm entirely different from Cleave. I don't have the same attitudes - but maybe I did.