The Dark Quotes

“They'd listen silenty, with grave faces: but once they'd turn to each other they'd smile cruelly. He couldn't have it both ways. He'd put himself outside and outside they'd make him stay. Neither brutality nor complaining could force a way in.”
― John McGahern, The Dark

“A priest could have no anguish, he’d given up happiness, his fixed life moving in the calm of certainty into its end, cursed by no earthly love or longing, all had been chosen years before.”
― John McGahern, The Dark

“All the things we say. And how little of all the words even touch any reality. Or perhaps they all do if we knew it,”
― John McGahern, The Dark

“to sit in the comforting darkness and reek of Jeyes Fluid to weep and grope their way in hatred and self-pity back to some sort of calm.”
― John McGahern, The Dark

“Through the window the stones of the graveyard stood out beyond the laurels in the moon, all the dead about, lives as much filled with themselves and their importance once as you this night, indecision and trouble and yearning put down equal with laughing into that area of clay, and they lay calm as you would one eternal night while someone full of problems and uncertainties would lie as awake as you in a room.”
― John McGahern, The Dark

“That’s one thing can’t be bought is brains. Only God can give brains. And they don’t come off the wind either.”
― John McGahern, The Dark

“Cool, calm and collected, the three seas of wisdom and success.”
― John McGahern, The Dark

“you are moving to the death of having to describe the real face of your life to your God in his priest, and to beg forgiveness, and promise, for there is still time.”
― John McGahern, The Dark