Quotes from John Banville

No w?a?nie, przedmioty potrafi? przetrwa?, a ?ywi tymczasem znikaj?.

Przesz?o?? bije we mnie niczym drugie serce.

Perhaps it was the flabby stink of seared flesh that was making me feel peculiar; that, and the smoke from the candles on the tables and the borborygmic blarings of the three-piece band.

Thus in the minds of the many does the one ramify and disperse. It does not last, it cannot, it is not immortality. 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.

A wi?c, panie doktorze - odezwa?a si? troch? za g?o?no, radosnym, zdecydowanym tonem gwiazdy filmowej z lat czterdziestych - to wyrok ?mierci czy do?ywocie?

wanted to tell her about the blade of sunlight cleaving the velvet shadows of the public urinal that post-war spring afternoon in Regensburg, of the incongruous gaiety of the rain shower that fell the day of my father's funeral, of that last night with Boy when I saw the red ship under Blackfriars Bridge and conceived of the tragic significance of my life: in other words, the real things; the true things.

Na mi?o?? bosk?, nie histeryzuj! - odburkn??a. - Po prostu umieram, koniec kropka.

Encline aux vérités qui tuent, elle n'avait nulle intention de blesser.

But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all? We

By? mo?e caÅ'e ?ycie jest zaledwie dÅ'ugim przygotowaniem do chwili, w której siÄ™ z nim rozstajemy.

Love, I have always found, is most intense when its object is unworthy of it.

The skin of his weather-beaten face and the backs of his hands is wrinkled and brown and shiny, like shiny brown paper that had been used to wrap something unwrappable.

The rain had turned sleety, and swarmed and slithered on the windscreen like blown spit. Trees loomed blankly before us, and rents appeared in the clouds, burning white glares within a dull grey surround, though the wind quickly sealed them up again.

In fact, it wasn't Cagney so much as Richard Widmark that he secretly imagined himself as, especially in the part of  Harry Fabian in Night and the City, which he had seen four times and

something inside me seemed to shift and slide, and for a moment I felt nauseous, and panic sent a hot bead rolling down my spine. ... Slowly the nausea gave way to a stifling sensation, as if an invisible caul were being pulled down over my head and shoulders.

I had a sudden image of myself as a sort of large dark simian something slumped there at the table, or not a something but a nothing, rather, a hole in the room, a palpable absence, a darkness visible.

What are living beings, compared to the enduring intensity of mere things?

A fight with one's daughter is never less than debilitating.

There was a beat of silence and the atmosphere thickened briefly. I glanced from one of them to the other, seeming to detect an invisible something passing between them, not so much a signal as a sort of silent token, like one of those almost impalpable acknowledgements that adulterers exchange when they are in company. The phenomenon was strange to me still but would become increasingly familiar the deep I penetrated into the secret world.

Some people make it their life's work, being unhappy.

The common people?—pah. What are they to us? You and I, mein Freund, we are lords of the earth, the great ones, the major men, the makers of supreme fictions.

He had a habit also, when being spoken to, no matter how earnestly, of turning very slowly on his heel and limping a little way away, head bowed, and then stopping to stand with his back turned and hands clasped behind him, so that one could not be sure that he was still listening to what one was saying, or had sunk into altogether more profound communings with himself.

To do the worst thing, the very worst thing, that's the way to be free. I would never again need to pretend to myself to be what I was not.

Å»aden szczegóÅ' ludzkiego oblicza nie zniesie dÅ'u?szej obserwacji.