Eclipse Quotes

“This, I told myself, this is the way I shall be condemned to pass my days, turning over words, stray lines, fragments of memory, to see what might be lurking underneath them, as if they were so many flat stones, while I steadily faded.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“There is in me, deep down, as there must be in everyone–at least, I hope there is, for I would not wish to be alone in this–a part that does not care for anything other than itself. I could lose everything and everyone and that pilot light would still be burning at my centre, that steady flame that nothing will quench, until the final quenching.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“Lately I had been finding it hard to understand the simplest things people said to me, as if what they were speaking in were a form of language I did not recognise; I would know the words but could not assemble them into sense.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“Everything in the room seemed turned away from me in sullen resistance, averthing itself from my unwelcome return.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“¿Qué tienen esos momentos intemporales que luego siempre se recuerdan con una dulce melancolía? A veces me parece que es en esos intervalos de vacío, sin que fuera consciente de ello, cuando he vivido de manera más real y auténtica.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“It has always seemed to me a disgrace that the embarrassments of early life should continue to smart throughout adulthood with undiminished intensity. Is it not enough that our youthful blunders made us cringe at the time, when we were at our tenderest, but must stay with us beyond cure, burn marks ready to flare up painfully at the merest touch? No: an indiscretion from earliest adolescence will still bring a blush to the cheek of the nonagenarian on his deathbed.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“The big rippled sheets of glass were taken out of their sacking and lowered from the back of the wagon, and for a few giddy moments a troupe of rubbery dwarves and etiolated giants shimmied and shivered in those depthless caskets. of light.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“What is it about such occasions of timeless time that afterwards makes them seem touched with such a precious, melancholy sweetness? Sometimes it seems to me that it is in those vacant intervals, without my being aware of it, that my true life has been most authentically lived.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“When I look ahead, I see nothing except empty morning, and no day, only dusk thickening into night, and, far off, something that is not to be made out, something vague, patient, biding. Is that the future, trying to speak to me here, among these shadows of the past? I do not want to hear what it might have to say.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“I see what was my life adrift behind me, going smaller and smaller with distance,”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“Here I am, a grown man in a haunted house, obsessing on the past.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“the vacated air quivering where a second ago I am convinced someone more substantial than a ghost”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“cast up on the morning like a survivor from a shipwreck.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“two humble caryatids holding up the portal to my future, watching patiently, in uncomplaining puzzlement, as I strode away from them with hardly a backward glance, each league that I covered making me not smaller but steadily more vast, their overgrown, incomprehensible son.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“Everything is poised for dissolution.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“paying deference to this plain thing that has known its numinous moment.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“appurtenances”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“They have that air of inscrutable significance that will surround people encountered the morning after a troubling dream in which they have figured.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“There is something in them of those ancestral resemblances that will spring unnervingly up at one from the cradle or the deathbed.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“They are still growing into existence, these shadows made of light, or perhaps they existed once and are fading now.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“I wondered when exactly the moment of catastrophic inattention had occurred and I had dropped the gilded bowl of my life and let it shatter.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“The open doorway of a hardware shop breathed brownly at me as I went past.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“the shut gates guarding all the unspent riches of what she might have been.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“Pasiphaë,”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“matutinal”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“This is how I wake now, sidling warily out of sleep as though I had spent the night in hiding.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“Mnemosyne”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“Amphitryon?”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“dado.”
― John Banville, Eclipse