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

“behind the sorrow and the ceaseless tears, hardly palpable yet never fading, the background hum of relief. Yes, there was a kind of relief. For now that the worst had happened, I would no longer have to live in fear of it. Thus reason, stricken, formulates its wounded logic.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“virescent”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“life, in its heartless way, insisting on being lived.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“stood in the darkness by the window for a long time, looking down on the deserted harbour, and the sea, whose little, lapsing waves seemed something that was being sleepily spoken, over and over. There was a storm on the day that we flew home.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“I have always had the greatest difficulty distinguishing between action and acting.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“wept at last, plunging headlong helplessly into the suddenly hollow depths of myself”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“The Lord temper the wind to the shorn lamp, says the Psalmist, but I am here to tell you that the Psalmist is wrong.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“Golgotha.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“It was quiet, there at the season’s end. We held hands, for the first time since the days of the Hotel Halcyon. A gold and smoke-grey sunset sank out at sea like a slow catastrophe, and the warm night came on, and the lamps on the harbour glowed, and the bristling masts tilted, and a bat swooped and swerved soundlessly about us. In the room we lay sleepless side by side on the big high bed, like a pair of long-term hospital patients, listening to the faint far whisperings of the sea.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“our eclipsed light,”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“There were sleepy cats in doorways, and geraniums on window sills, and a yellow canary was singing in its cage, and we could hear the voices of children at play somewhere, in some sequestered courtyard, and our daughter was dead.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“unreally perfect”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“mendicant”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“Tragedy always has its anonymous messengers, in sandals and robe they run in fleet-footed from the wings and fall to one knee before the throne, heads bowed, leaning on the caduceus. Or do I mean caducous? Words, words. No matter, I have not the energy to look up the dictionary, and anyway, when I think of it, both words apply, in this case. I am running dry.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“the dog days, when Sirius rises and sets with the sun.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“it was as if a drop of the most refined, the purest acid had been let fall into an open chamber of my heart.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“There is only one stage; wherever the venue, it is always the same.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“A cloud had risen in the sky, blank as a wall, and now there was a hushing sound, and the rain came, hard quick vengeful rods falling straight down and splattering on the pavement like so many flung pennies.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“In such places my fancy tarried uneasily, frightening itself with the thought of nameless terrors.”
― John Banville, Eclipse

“I found to my surprise that I missed my twice-weekly dawdles there in that cold bleak ante-room. 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

“the quiffed mama’s boys with their violin cases like miniature coffins, the girls pasty and glowering, in awkward shoes.”
― John Banville, Eclipse