Quotes from John Banville

I cut him off at once, with that particular form of corrosive savagery that grown sons reserve for their bumbling fathers.

The steel kettle shone, a slow furl of steam at its spout, vaguely suggestive of genie and lamp. Oh, grant me a wish, just the one.

And anyway, who's to say that what we see when we're drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria

I'm a priest for Christ's sake - how can this be happening to me?

a thief's heart is an impetuous organ, and while inwardly he throbs for absolution, at the same time he can't keep from bragging.

Lots of water under that bridge, let's not drown ourselves in it.

Yes, things endure, while the living lapse.

A married couple never seem so married as when viewed from the back seat of a motor car, talking quietly together in the front. Polly and Marcus might have been in their bedroom already, so soft and intimate their converse sounded to me, as I sat there alertly mute behind the backs of their heads

This is the only way another creature can be known: on the surface, that's where there is depth.

She trained her camera on a fresh-faced hopeful but the pictures she produced were the mug-shots of a raddled old confidence trickster. Exposed, yes, that is the word

It sometimes occurs to me that everything I do is a substitute for something else, and that every venture I embark on is a botched attempt at reparation for a thing done or left undone—don't ask me to explain it.

I hadn't eaten anything at lunch, yet I wasn't hungry. The belly knows when it's not going to be fed and, like an old dog, settles down to sleep. That's how it is, I find, with the creature and its comforts, so that all is not ill, and sometimes the Lord does temper the wind to the shorn lamb.

Listen, listen, if I know my world, which is doubtful, but if I do, I know it is chaotic, mean and vicious, with laws cast in the wrong moulds, a fair conception gone awry, in short an awful place, and yet, and yet a place capable of glory in those rare moments when a little light breaks forth, and something is not explained, not forgiven, but merely illuminated.

his father was still living, and the living require more thought.

The world's first task, as I knew well, a task it never relaxed from, was to undo me. I was even afraid of the sky.

Oh, Ma, how little I understood you, thinking how little you understood.

Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us.

The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.

Man is only lovable in the multitude, and at a good distance.

The glimmering landscape materialized slowly before him. Such stillness. He might have been the last man in the world.

Tal vez el amor no nace ahí, no en un repentino arrebato de passion, sino en el reconocimiento y la sencilla aceptación de, de algo que no sé qué es

I think he is losing heart in his attempts to woo her. In that bright-yellow waistcoat, the bottom button always punctiliously undone and the pointed flaps open over his neat little paunch, he is as intent and circumspect as one of those outlandishly plumed male birds, peacock or cock peasant, who gorgeously stalk up and down at a distance, desperate of eye but pretending indifference, while the drab hen unconcernedly pecks in the gravel for grubs.

blue as a new bruise

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