The Untouchable Quotes

“To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start. I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“We erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves - idealised, you know, but still recognisable - and then spend our lives engaged in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“How deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“When I was a child and heard about angels, I was both frightened and fascinated by the thought of these enormous, invisible presences in our midst. I conceived of them not as white-robed androgynes with yellow locks and thick gold wings, which was how my friend Matty Wilson had described them to me--Matty was the predecessor of all sorts of arcane knowledge--but as big, dark, blundering men, massive in their weightlessness, given to pranks and ponderous play, who might knock you over, or break you in half, without meaning to. When a child from Miss Molyneaux's infant school in Carrickdrum fell under the hoofs of a dray-horse one day and was trampled to death, I, a watchful six year old, knew who was to blame; I pictured his guardian angel standing over the child's crushed form with his big hands helplessly extended, not sure whether to be contrite or to laugh.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“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”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“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.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“Man is only lovable in the multitude, and at a good distance.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“I cut him off at once, with that particular form of corrosive savagery that grown sons reserve for their bumbling fathers.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“Belief is hard, and the abyss is always there, under one's feet.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“Espionage has something of the quality of a dream. In the spy's world, as in dreams, the terrain is always uncertain. You put your foot on what looks like solid ground and it gives way under you and you go into a kind of free fall, turning slowly tail over tip and clutching onto things that are themselves falling. This instability, this myriad-ness, that the world takes on, is both the attraction and terror of being a spy. Attraction, because in the midst of such uncertainty you are never required to be yourself; whatever you do, there is another, alternative you standing invisibly to one side, observing, evaluating, remembering…. This is the secret power of the spy… it is the power to be and not be, to detach oneself from oneself, to be oneself and at the same time another. The trouble is, if I were always at least two versions of myself, so all others must be similarly twinned with themselves in this awful, slippery way.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“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.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“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.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“In this new life I am condemned to, is there nothing that is not open to doubt?”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“chaos and butchery. The People must be united, must”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“We ate some kind of cold game, venison, I think, with dumplings, which looked like the testicles of a giant albino, and were so dense and sticky that after my knife had gone through them the lips of the wound would shut again with a repulsive, kissing sound.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“...something that has no past is not alive yet, is it. Life is memory; life is the past.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“suspect he knew how much I hated my name—only bandleaders and petty crooks are called Victor—for he used it at every opportunity.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“I felt like a theatre-goer trapped in the middle of a long second act who hears, outside, a fire engine howling past in the direction of his own house.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“The Stoics denied the concept of progress. There might be a little advance here, some improvement there—cosmology in their time, dentistry in ours—but in the long run the balance of things, such as good and evil, beauty and ugliness, joy and misery, remains constant.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“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.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“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.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“Love, I have always found, is most intense when its object is unworthy of it.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“Immediately, like a fond old roué, I sought to introduce Danny to what used to be called the finer things of life. I brought him—my God, I burn with shame to think of it—I brought him to the Institute and made him sit and listen while I lectured on Poussin’s second period in Rome, on Claude Lorrain and the cult of landscape, on François Mansart and the French baroque style. While I spoke, his attention would decline in three distinct stages. For five minutes or so he would sit up very straight with his hands folded in his lap, watching me with the concentration of a retriever on point; then would come a long central period of increasing agitation, during which he would study the other students, or lean over at the window to follow the progress of someone crossing the courtyard below, or bite his nails with tiny, darting movements, like a jeweller cutting and shaping a row of precious stones; after that, until the end of the lecture, he would sink into a trance of boredom, head sunk on neck, his eyelids drooping at the corners and his lips slackly parted. I covered up my disappointment in him on these occasions as best I could. Yet he did so try to keep up, to seem interested and impressed.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“We reached the car. An overhanging tree gave itself a doggy shake and a random splatter of raindrops fell on me, rattling on the brim of my hat. I suddenly saw the Back Road in Carrickdrum, and remembered myself walking with my father one wet November night like this when I was a boy: the steamy light of the infrequent gas lamps, and the undersides of the dark trees thrashing in what seemed an anguish of their own, and the sudden, inexplicable swelling of ardour inside me that made me want to howl in ecstatic sorrow, yearning for something nameless, which must have been the future, I suppose.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“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.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“Guilt is the only affect I know of that does not diminish with time. Nor does the guilty conscience have any sense of priority or right proportion. In my time I have, knowingly or otherwise, sent men and women to terrible deaths, yet I do not feel as sharp a pang when I think of them as I do when I recall the gleam of light on my father’s bowed pate at the table just then, or Hettie’s big sad soft eyes looking at me in silent beseeching, without anger or resentment, asking me to be kind to an ageing, anxious man, to be tolerant of the littleness of their lives; asking me to have a heart.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“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.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“Destruam et aedificabo, as Proudhon was wont to cry.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable