Athena Quotes

“Encline aux vérités qui tuent, elle n'avait nulle intention de blesser.”
― John Banville, Athena

“there in the sun and shadow on that noisy street-corner where I stood dithering in gloomy, middle-aged dishevelment.”
― John Banville, Athena

“There was a smudge of lipstick like a fresh bruise at the corner of her mouth.”
― John Banville, Athena

“the floor and were lying quietly now watching rain-clouds progressing like noble wreckage across the jumbled rooftops of the city.”
― John Banville, Athena

“lack was in me from the start. Maybe a chromosome went missing in the small bang out of which I was formed.”
― John Banville, Athena

“in this Bermuda Triangle of the soul, the fine discriminations that are a”
― John Banville, Athena

“Suddenly the door opened and a young woman dressed in black stepped out and paused a moment on the pavement,”
― John Banville, Athena

“Probably I am not remembering at all, but imagining, which is why it seems so real.”
― John Banville, Athena

“The whole business then seems a scandal, or a dreadful joke devised by someone who has long since gone away, the point of which has been lost and at which no one is laughing.”
― John Banville, Athena

“It is at such moments that I am most acutely aware of my conscious self, and feel the electric throb and tingle, the flimsiness and awful weight, of being a living, thinking thing.”
― John Banville, Athena

“the day of your going became the pivot on which the eras turned;”
― John Banville, Athena

“Things from long ago seem as if they had happened yesterday while yesterday itself grows ancient before today has waned.”
― John Banville, Athena

“The room too seemed to diminish in size as she grew larger in”
― John Banville, Athena

“Aunt Corky had an intimately dramatic relationship with the world at large; no phenomenon of history or happenstance was so momentous or so trivial that she would not see it as an effect directed solely at her.”
― John Banville, Athena

“RLS’s plucky boy”
― John Banville, Athena

“lachrymose.”
― John Banville, Athena

“loss of you not flame enough, that I must keep scorching myself over these embers?”
― John Banville, Athena

“what used to be called measured tones,”
― John Banville, Athena

“cling to the present tense as to a sheer cliff’s last hand-hold.”
― John Banville, Athena

“always it is there, you see, the yearning for solitude, for the cell.”
― John Banville, Athena

“Rouault face.”
― John Banville, Athena

“the orotund quality that sets in when I begin consciously to dissemble: and so much had happened to me and to my life since those by now archaic days – dear, oh dear! Whenever I employ locutions such as that you will know I am inventing. But then, when do I not use such locutions?”
― John Banville, Athena

“catarrhal”
― John Banville, Athena

“mountebank.”
― John Banville, Athena

“At this muffled end of another year”
― John Banville, Athena