Quotes from John Banville

Pacjent - powiedzia?a mi pewnego dnia Anna, ju? blisko ko?ca - to dziwne s?owo. Cierpliwy. A ja wcale nie jestem cierpliwa.

The true workers all die in a fidget of frustration. So much to do, and so much left undone.

They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide.

A teraz, ju? po wszystkim, co? nowego si? zacz??o, nowego dla mnie - trudna sztuka ?ycia po ?mierci.

I shall be seventy-two this year. Impossible to believe. Inside, an eternal twenty-two. I suppose that is how it is for everybody old.

The policeman insists that there be a plot. However, life itself is plotless.

I was estranged from myself and all that I had once supposed I was. My life up to now had only the weightless density of a dream. When I thought about my past it was like thinking of what someone else had been, someone I had never met but whose history I knew by heart. It all seemed no more than a vivid fiction.

I looked out into the luminous grey twilight, aghast and in an obscure way proud at the thought of what I had lost, of what might have been.

Auden wrote somewhere that no matter what the age of the company, he was always convinced he was the youngest in the room; me, too.

ineluctable laws of which were everywhere at work. This gnosis

For even at such a tender age I knew that there is always a lover and a loved, and knew which one, in this case, I would be.

We have had quite a time of it, quite a time. I move, when I move, in a daze of bafflement. It's as if I had been standing for all my life in front of a full-length mirror, watching the people passing by, behind and in front of me, and now someone had taken me roughly by the shoulders and spun me about, and behold! There it was, the unreflected world, of people and things, and I nowhere to be seen in it. I might as well have been the one who died.

Destruam et aedificabo, as Proudhon was wont to cry.

I am well aware of what I expected, what I expect, of my daughter, and of the selfishness and pathos of that expectation. Much is demanded of the dilettante's offspring. She will do what I could not, and be a great scholar, if I have any say in the matter, and I have.

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

Pomieszczenie wygl?da?o tak, jak je zapami?ta?em. Albo wygl?da?o, jak gdyby by?o takie, jakim je zapami?ta?em, gdy? z regu?y wspomnienia dopasowuj? si? niezauwa?alnie do rzeczy i miejsc z odwiedzanej przesz?o?ci.

Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world's wall [...]

To, ?e tu jestem, wynika po prostu z potrzeby, ?eby nigdzie nie by?.

Childhood is supposed to be a radiant springtime but mine seems to have been always autumn, the gales seething in the big beeches behind this old gate-lodge, as they're doing right now, and the rooks above them wheeling haphazard, like scraps of char from a bonfire, and a custard-coloured gleam having its last go low down in the western sky.

We understood each other, yes, but that did not mean we knew each other, or wanted to. How would we have maintained that unselfconscious grace that was so important to us both, if we had not also maintained the essential secretness of our inner selves?

ByÅ'em zawsze wyró?niajÄ…cym siÄ™ nikim, którego bezwzglÄ™dnym ?yczeniem byÅ'o sta? siÄ™ niewyró?niajÄ…cym siÄ™ kimÅ›.

I have achieved nothing, nothing. I am what I always was, alone as always, locked in the same old glass prison of myself.

I see them there, my poor parents, rancorously playing at house in the childhood of the world. Their unhappiness was one of the constants of my earliest years, a high, unceasing buzz just beyond hearing. I did not hate them. I loved them, probably. Only they were in my way, obscuring my view of the future. In time I would be able to see right through them, my transparent parents.

Bushmills was supposedly the whiskey favored by Protestants, while Jameson's was the Catholics' choice.