Quotes from John Banville

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquillity, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.

Do other people, remembering their parents, feel, as I do, a sense of having inadvertently done a small though significant, irreversible wrong?

He liked to bewilder his pupils, it was a form of tyranny.

His years as a policeman had taught him to be not fearless, only to disregard the fact of being afraid.

Her own mother had died when Anna was twelve and since then father and daughter had faced the world like a pair of nineteenth-century adventurers, a riverboat gambler, say, and his alibi girl.

It is a true pleasure to live in a century in which such great events take place, provided that one can take shelter in some little corner and watch the play in comfort. (attributed to N. Poussin)

I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.

Remember what April was like when we were young, that sense of liquid rushing and the wind taking blue scoops out of the air and the birds beside themselves in the budding trees?

I make my voyage out, far, far out, to the very brim, where a disc of water shimmers like molten coin against a coin-colored sky, and everything lifts, and sky and water merge invisibly. that is where I seem to the most at ease now, on the far, pale margin of things. If I can call it ease. If I can call it being

What is my purpose here? I may say, I just sat down to write, but I am not deceived. I have never done anything in my life that did not have a purpose, usually hidden, sometimes even from myself.

What did I brood on, sitting there in the classic pose with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands? We do not need to go to the Greeks, our tragic predicament is written out on rolls of lavatory paper.

In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind. If you are going to write about me, you must resign yourself to that.

Yet even without saying, each knew what the other was thinking, and, more acutely, what the other was feeling -- this is a further effect of our shared sorrow, this empathy, this mournful telepathy.

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

He made the mistake of imagining that his possessions were a measure of his own worth, and strutted and crowed, parading his things like a schoolboy with a champion catapult.

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self. And incredulity, that too was a large part of being happy, I mean that euphoric inability fully to believe one's simple luck.

Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it. For

In this new life I am condemned to, is there nothing that is not open to doubt?

Whom now would I love, and who would love me?

There are moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it

What a little vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this muffled silence through the autumn dark.

Tendo a non fare molto caso alle altre persone – l'ho già detto in precedenza, è uno dei miei difetti più gravi – e nelle rare occasioni in cui metto la testa fuori dal guscio e do una bella occhiata, quello che mi colpisce in modo strabiliante non è quanto siano diversi da me, ma quanto siano simili, malgrado tutto.

He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.

It has always seemed to me a disgrace that the embarrassments of early life should continue to smart throughout adulthood with undiminished intensity. Is it not enough that our youthful blunders made us cringe at the time, when we were at our tenderest, but must stay with us beyond cure, burn marks ready to flare up painfully at the merest touch? No: an indiscretion from earliest adolescence will still bring a blush to the cheek of the nonagenarian on his deathbed.