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: From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea