The Testament of Mary Quotes

“Dreams belong to each of us alone, just as pain does.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“I do not know why it matters that I should tell the truth to myself at night, why it should matter that the truth should be spoken at least once in the world. Because the world is a place of silence, the sky at night when the birds have gone is a vast silent place. Words will make the slightest difference to the sky at night. They will not brighten it or make it less strange. And the day too has its own deep indifference to anything that is said.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“I remember too much; I am like the air on a calm day as it holds itself still, letting nothing escape.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“I like it that they [disciples] feed me and pay for my clothes and protect me. And in return I will do for them what I can, but no more than that. Just as I cannot breathe the breath of another or help the heart of someone else to beat or their bones not to weaken or their flesh not to shrivel, I cannot say more than I can say. And I know how deeply this disturbs them, and it would make me smile, this earnest need for foolish anecdote or sharp simple patterns in the story of what happened to us all, except that I have forgotten how to smile.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“If water can be changed into wine and the dead can be brought back, then I want time pushed back.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“I told him before he departed that all my life when I have seen more than two men together I have seen foolishness and I have seen cruelty, but it is foolishness I have noticed first.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“In the meantime, when I wake in the night, I want more. I want what happened not to have happened, to have taken another course.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“The details of what I told him were with me all the years in the same way as my hands or my arms were with me.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“The world has loosened, like a woman preparing for bed who lets her hair flow free. And I am whispering the words, knowing that words matter, and smiling as I say them to the shadows of the gods of this place who linger in the air to watch me and hear me.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary: A Novel

“What is hard to understand is that our dreams matter”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“On one of the nights during my journey I wandered out under the sky which was lit with stars and I believed for a moment that soon these stars would cease to glitter, that the nights of the future would be dark beyond dark, that the world itself would undergo a great change, and then I quickly came to see that the change would happen only to me and to the few who knew me; it would be only we who would look at the sky at night in the future and see the darkness before we saw the glitter. We would see the glittering stars as false and mocking, or as bewildered themselves by the night as we were , as leftover things confined to their place, their shining nothing more than a sort of pleading.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“He was the boy I had given birth to and he was more defenceless now than he had been then.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary: A Novel

“people shouting that if he could heal the sick and make the crippled walk and the blind see, then he could raise the dead.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary: A Novel

“Her two visitors are clearly some of the apostles, the men who wrote the New Testament; others, such as Miriam or her “cousin” Marcus, are invented.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary: A Novel

“his legs where the bones had been broken,”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary: A Novel

“But that will be the beginning.” “Of what?” I asked. “Of a new life for the world,”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary: A Novel

“[...] all my life when I have seen more than two men together I have seen foolishness and I have seen cruelty, but it is foolishness that I have noticed first.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“It was my companion, my strange friend who woke me in the night and again in the morning and who stayed close all day.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“We would see the glittering stars as false and mocking, or as bewildered themselves by the night as we were, as left-over things confined to their place, their shining nothing more than a sort of pleading.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary: A Novel

“My son was wearing rich clothes and he was moving as though the clothes belonged to him as of right.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary: A Novel