Shroud Quotes

“All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“Time and age have brought not wisdom, as they are supposed to do, but confusion, and a broadening incomprehension, each year laying down another ring of nesience.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“I am, as is surely apparent by now, a thing made up wholly of poses. In this I may not be unique, it may be thus for everyone, more or less, I do not know, or care. What I do know is that having lived my life in the awareness, or even if only in the illusion, of being constantly watched, constantly under scrutiny, I am all frontage; stroll around to the back and all you will find is some sawdust and a few shaky struts and a mess of wiring. There is not a sincere bone in the entire body of my text. I have manufactured a voice, as once I manufactured a reputation, from material filched from others. The accent you hear is not mine, for I have no accent. I cannot believe a word out of my own mouth.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“the smell is the smell of re-breathed air”
― John Banville, Shroud

“estaminet,”
― John Banville, Shroud

“lachrymose”
― John Banville, Shroud

“smiling drowsily to himself that betokened a rich mental store of voluptuous images.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“louche”
― John Banville, Shroud

“He, I, I saw again the empty bottle on its”
― John Banville, Shroud

“Soon, in a very few years, a decade at most, surely, he would be gone, and all that he had been and was now would be no more.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“Everything was so strange, all pulled out of shape and littered with torn-up things, like a stretch of shoreline after a storm.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“house vibrated, as if I were standing inside the dome of a great bell that a moment ago had sounded its final peal.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“leman,”
― John Banville, Shroud

“The dark dress and thonged sandals that she wore gave her an Attic look: Electra astray in the city of tombs.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“I am done with the past; at a certain point when I look back a line is drawn stark across the view, as if a landslide had happened there.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“I vented gas from my rear end without restraint, not caring if she heard, or smelt.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“mendicants”
― John Banville, Shroud

“She liked trams, the ungainly, earnest look of them.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“all were united in acclaiming my mastery of the language, the tone and pitch of my singular voice; even my critics, and there were more than a few of them, could only stand back and watch in frustration as their best barbs skidded off the high gloss of my prose style.This surprised as much as it pleased me; how could they not see, in hiding behind the brashness and the bravado of what I wrote, the trembling autodidact hunched over his Webster’s, his Chicago Manual, his Grammar for Foreign Students? Perhaps it was the very bizarreries of usage which I unavoidably fell into that they took for the willed eccentricities in which they imagined only a lord of language would dare to indulge. Do not misunderstand me: I have no doubt that I possess genius, of a kind. It is just not the kind that it has pretended all those years to be. I sometimes think that I missed my calling, that I could have been a great artist, a master of compelling inventiveness, arch, allusive, magisterially splenetic, given to arcane reference, obscure aims, an alchemist of word and image. Indeed, my critics often grumble at the desolate lyricism of my mature style, seeing behind it the pale hand of the poet. I take their point. Mine is the kind of commentary in which frequently the comment will claim an equal rank with that which is supposedly its object; equal, and sometimes superior. In my study of Rilke, an early work, there are passages of ecstatic intensity that world-drunk lyricist himself might have envied, while those long, twinned essays on Kleist and on Kafka are as desperate and inconsolable as any of the plays or the parables of those two hierophants of dejection. Shall I bow before these great ones? Shall I bend the knee to their eminence? Damned if I will. I hold myself as high as any of them, in my own estimation. What troubles me only is the thought of all I might have done had I been simply—if such a thing may be said to be simple—myself. Magda was apparently as impressed by me as everyone else was, and took my poses and my brilliant pretences at their face value. If she knew I was a fraud, she did not seem to mind; seemed, indeed, to admire me, in her detached way, for my nerve and resourcefulness.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“mordancy”
― John Banville, Shroud

“My life with her was a special way of being alone.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee,”
― John Banville, Shroud

“she was constantly on my mind, if only as a shadow, the solitary spectator sitting in the benches above the spotlit ring where the gaudy and increasingly chaotic performance of who and what I am pretending to be is carried on without interval.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“As if place meant something; as if being somewhere vivid and exotic ensured an automatic intensification of living.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“What is remarkable is not that we remember, but that we forget—”
― John Banville, Shroud

“the sight of which twanged another vaguely nostalgic string at the far back of my memory.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“Nothing like a good deep chestful of cigarette smoke to quell a morning cough.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“They say that Danton’s severed head was heard to heap curses on Robespierre.To”
― John Banville, Shroud

“the once-sharp edges of my self are blurring.”
― John Banville, Shroud

“Is there such a word? Sometimes even still the language puts out a foot for me to trip over.”
― John Banville, Shroud