Quotes from John Banville

O my friends!- to be queer was very bliss. The fifties was the last great age of queerdom. All the talk now is of freedom and pride (pride!), but there young hotheads in their pink bell-bottoms, clamouring for the right to do it in the streets if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to wish to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear

The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend.

I often ask myself whether my decision to pursue a life of scholarship -- if decision is the right word -- was a result of an essential poverty of the soul, or if the desiccation which I sometimes suspect is the one truly distinguishing mark of my scholarship was an inevitable consequence of that decision.

At the seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky.

Qué tienen esos momentos intemporales que luego siempre se recuerdan con una dulce melancolía? A veces me parece que es en esos intervalos de vacío, sin que fuera consciente de ello, cuando he vivido de manera más real y auténtica.

Adam senses a large weariness in him, the weariness of an old actor in the middle of a long run in an old part.

The novel is a kind of elephant. But I like to make that elephant dance on a quarter.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

Chaos is nothing but an infinite number of ordered things.

There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me think of twilight and mists and dead maidens. Tonight it tinkled in my mouth like secret laughter.

Happy sadness, sad happiness, the story of my life and loves

Yes, another April; in a way, in this story, it is always April.

Yes, tings endure while the living lapse

Together they will spend a happy hour seated side by side..., while Ivy's tender hand guides Duffy's as he traces out laboriously, in pencil, over and over until he has them off pat, the magic letters of his name. More than the wedding itself, that little ceremony there under the lamp, all silent save for the soft scratching of graphite on paper, will mark the true beginning of their life together.

Her mouth tasted of smoke and toothpaste and something feety that made my blood flare

her mouth working mutely like the valve of an undersea creature

The big rippled sheets of glass were taken out of their sacking and lowered from the back of the wagon, and for a few giddy moments a troupe of rubbery dwarves and etiolated giants shimmied and shivered in those depthless caskets. of light.

We swam in sunshine and in rain; we swam in the morning, when the sea was sluggish as soup, we swam at night, the water flowing over our arms like undulations of black satin; one afternoon we stayed in the water during a thunderstorm, and a fork of lightning struck the surface of the sea so closer to us we heard the crackle of it and smelt the burnt air.

Let us say, the present is where we live, while the past is where we dream.

We do not grow up; all we do is grow dull.

all frail sufferers from the same disease that affected me, all ailing bibliomanes being treated for addiction, as in a literary methadone clinic...

The world is always ready to be amazed, but the self, that lynx-eyed monitor, sees all the subterfuges, all the cut corners, and is not deceived.

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

Belief is hard, and the abyss is always there, under one's feet.