Quotes from John Banville

The Stoics denied the concept of progress. There might be a little advance here, some improvement there—cosmology in their time, dentistry in ours—but in the long run the balance of things, such as good and evil, beauty and ugliness, joy and misery, remains constant.

It is in the forms of the living that the dead most convincingly haunt us.

Siempre fui un nadie bien definido cuya mayor ansia fue ser un alguien indefinido.

Another week done with. How quickly the time goes as the season advances, the earth hurtling along its groove into the years's sharply descending final arc.

of her blood. Oh, I do not say these are

None of this means anything. Anything of significance, that is. I am just amusing myself, musing, losing myself in a welter of words. For words in here are a form of luxury, of sensuousness, they are all we have been allowed to keep of the rich, wasteful world from which we are shut away.

The pleasures of acquisition are well known—says the thief, the former thief—but who ever mentions the quiet joy of letting things go?

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.

moorhen swam on the water, delicately unzipping the placid surface as it went, her half-grown chicks strung out in a line behind her, bobbing along.

Do not look so worried, Anna said, I hated you too a little, we were human beings, after all.

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.

if you're prepared to eat them, you must be prepared to murder them.

Wonderful, how an injection of pure speculation—never mind the questionable logic—icy-cold and colourless as a shot of opium, can deaden briefly even the worst of afflictions. Briefly.

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.

Ma ei looda surmajärgsele elule ega jumalusele, kes võiks seda pakkuda. Arvestades, missuguse maailma ta lõi, oleks temasse uskumine jumalavallatus.

For him, petulance was a pastime.

He had a special fondness for the moving parts of women, their wrists, their butterfly-shaped ankles, their shoulder blades like a swan's folded wings. In particular he treasured their knees, especially the back of them, where the skin was pale, milk-blue, with delicate fissures, little fine cracks, as in the most fragile old pieces of bone china. — John Banville, April in Spain (Hanover Square Press, 2021)

What has this new generation to offer the world? Only the fruits of their fear.

Kundera's novel [ The Unbearable Lightness of Being ] seems as relevant now as it did when it was first published. Relevance, however, is nothing compared with that sense of felt life which the truly great novelists communicate.

But why at least? What a business it is, the human discourse. I

I am amazed at how little has changed in the more than fifty years that have gone by since I was last here. Amazed, and disappointed, I would go so far as to say appalled, for reasons that are obscure to me, since why should I desire change, I who have come back to live amidst the rubble of the past?

I felt like a theatre-goer trapped in the middle of a long second act who hears, outside, a fire engine howling past in the direction of his own house.

Guilt is the only affect I know of that does not diminish with time. Nor does the guilty conscience have any sense of priority or right proportion.

What is it about such occasions of timeless time that afterwards makes them seem touched with such a precious, melancholy sweetness? Sometimes it seems to me that it is in those vacant intervals, without my being aware of it, that my true life has been most authentically lived.