Athena Quotes

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

“weep inwardly for all that we never had yet feel convinced we have lost.”
― John Banville, Athena

“Esse est percipi.”
― John Banville, Athena

“How powerfully affecting they are, though, these reflexive moments when you not only feel something but also feel yourself feeling it.”
― John Banville, Athena

“the heave and surge of water – for in the dark of course one senses rather than sees it – coiling past me like a vast, fat, undulant animal hurrying to somewhere, intent and silent, the slippery lights of the city rolling swiftly along its back.”
― John Banville, Athena

“Iron-grey weather with wind and thin rain like umbrella-spokes.”
― John Banville, Athena

“shamed. Instead of which, of course, I should have taken him tenderly in my arms and breathed deep his noxious stink and cried, ‘My friend, my fellow sufferer!’ as the misanthropic sage of Dresden recommends.”
― John Banville, Athena

“This is all confused, I know, unfocused and confused and other near-anagrams indicating distress.”
― John Banville, Athena

“Lugubrious rain-light slithered down the window.”
― John Banville, Athena

“dazed survivor of Armageddon, in foot-rags and squashed top-hat, idly turning over these scorched pages in his bomb-shelter of a night),”
― John Banville, Athena

“Outside, the night set upon me with a vengeance. Black rain fell across the shaking lamplight in the porch and the carpark was awash with wrinkled water.”
― John Banville, Athena

“I wanted to save you, to bring you back into the world, to knit up your poor shattered bones and make you whole. While all I managed to do was hasten your dying. I wish you had not left me your money.”
― John Banville, Athena

“The wind whistled in the spumy air above the river and the water heaved and tumbled like a jumble of big square brown boxes.”
― John Banville, Athena

“it was as if his face were a disguise within a disguise and behind it someone else entirely had stepped up and put a different eye to the empty socket and looked out at me with casual and amused contempt,”
― John Banville, Athena

“the cars vying for parking spaces like bad-tempered seals.”
― John Banville, Athena

“between us always there was that which seemed to overleap the selfish flesh, that seemed to overleap even each other and, quivering, endured, as the arrow endures the bowstring before being transformed into pure flight.”
― John Banville, Athena

“Gaspara Stampa”
― John Banville, Athena

“And so Aunt Corky became another strand in the thick, polished, frightening rope into which my life was being woven. In the mornings I would wake with a knot of anxiety behind my breastbone, and for a minute or two I would lie stiff and staring as my mind strove laboriously to unpick this ganglion of hard-laid hemp. My days were a kind of breathless straining on tiptoe as I swung at the end of my fear between, on one side, Inspector Hackett and all he represented, and, on the other, Morden and the Da.”
― John Banville, Athena

“I would see again afternoons like this in the far past and myself as a child at a window watching the day fail and the rooks settling in the high, bare trees and the rain like time itself drifting down.”
― John Banville, Athena

“stertorously.”
― John Banville, Athena

“somewhere at the heart of things a vast pulse was slowly thudding.”
― John Banville, Athena

“that Happy Valley of the heart where I long one day to wander,”
― John Banville, Athena

“Plump hot tears fell on our knuckles, each one printed with a tiny, curved image of the window in which the raucous grey day was rapidly dying.”
― John Banville, Athena

“There is a barrier, a frontier of the emotions, where one must surrender – what is it: self-possession? dignity? grown-upness? – in exchange for the giddy and outlandish pleasure of abandoning oneself wholly to grief.”
― John Banville, Athena

“oceanic susurrus”
― John Banville, Athena

“Oh, my sweet cheat, I believed every bit of it.”
― John Banville, Athena

“The tales she spun had been breathed on and polished so often that the detailing had become blurred.”
― John Banville, Athena

“pentapus”
― John Banville, Athena

“This I am convinced is what sex is, the anaesthetic that makes bearable the flesh of another. And we erect cathedrals upon it.”
― John Banville, Athena

“felt her heart beating and listened to the rustle of her breathing and thought I had come at last to my true place, the place where, still and at the same time profoundly stirred, feverish yet preternaturally calm, I would at last be who I was.”
― John Banville, Athena