The Master Quotes

“For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“It is terrible to be an unprotected being.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her. What once was life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“Life is but a day and expresses mainly a single note.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment. Sometimes the dullness came to the fore with a strange and insistent ache which he would entertain briefly, but learn to keep at bay. Mostly, however, it was the contentment he entertained; the slow ease and the silence could, once night had fallen, fill him with a happiness that nothing, no society nor the company of any individual, no glamour or glitter, could equal.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would ne be disturbed. The gap between these two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and experiencing singly and alone it own pain or fear or pleasure or complacency.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“The men could be easily distinguished as fellow Americans by the quality of their mustaches and the innocent and amicable expressions on their faces; the several women could only have come from New England, making this clear, he felt, by their willingness to allow their menfolk the right to speak at length while confining their own talk to short and brisk, intelligent interruptions or slightly disagreeable remarks once the men had finished.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“I have in mind a man who all his life believes that something dreadful will happen to him," Henry said. "He tells a woman of this unknown catastrophe and she becomes his greatest friend, but what he does not see is that his failure to believe in her, his own coldness, is the catastrophe, it has come already, it has lived within him all along.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“I have to give up everything, the house, the servants, my friends, my whole life. I will freeze to death or I will die of boredom. It will be a race between the two.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“When one of the young men asked her about the changes she had witnessed in Rome, she pursed her lips, as though she had been approached by a ticket collector, and spoke loudly.

"I don't go in for change. It is not one of my subjects. I have always taken the view that noticing change is a mistake. I notice what is directly in front of me.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“He walked up and down the stairs, going in to the rooms as though they, too, in how they yielded to him, belonged to an unrecoverable past, and would soon join the room with the tasseled tablecloths and the screens and the shadowed corners, and all the other rooms from whose windows he had observed the world, so that they could be remembered and captured and held.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“bye how life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the art of bidding an ordinary good night.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“His brother William had all of that too, but it was only one half of him; the other half was made up of a deep self-consciousness where all his rawness and freshness had been buried in irony.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“But I know now that fear and shock and bravery are merely words, and they do not tell us—nothing does—that when you experience them day in day out, you lose part of yourself and you can never get it back.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“You must tell me something that you are sure is true.” The words came to him in her sweet voice, and as he sat on his terrace in the darkness he wondered how he would have answered her if she had written the sentence to him.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“He knew that he would suffer no further indignity at the hands of theater audiences; he would devote himself, as he had pledged, to the silent art of fiction. If only he could work now, his days could be perfect, full of the delight of solitude and the pleasure wrought from finished pages.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“Once it became more solid, the emerging story and all its ramifications and possibilities lifted him out of the gloom of his failure. He grew determined that he would become more hardworking now. He took up his pen again—the pen of all his unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. It was now, he believed, that he would do the work of his life. He was ready to begin again, to return to the old high art of fiction with ambitions now too deep and pure for any utterance.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“He imagined the suddenness of the remark, saw his sister’s incomprehension, her attempt to smile. Henry alone understood the full cruelty of it, but he did nothing to silence the rest of them as they paraded the story in front of everyone who would listen, happiest if Alice were in the room to hear the story of her own humiliation at the hands of one of the most distinguished novelists of the age.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“He thought of work, ideas and characters, moments of clarity. He controlled these thoughts, he knew that they were like candles leading him through the dark. They could easily, if he did not concentrate, be snuffed out and he would again be pondering defeats and disappointments, which if not managed could lead to thoughts that left him desperate and afraid.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“He loved the glorious silence a morning brought, knowing that he had no appointments that afternoon and no engagements that evening. He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners and, indeed, the morals to be able to participate.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“The prospect of a morning alone with the view from the windows and the lovely proportions of the room for company filled him with happiness.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“He wished for solitude and for the comfort of knowing that his life depended not on the multitude but on remaining himself.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“He foresaw an end to long, solitary days; the grim satisfaction that fiction gave him would be replaced by a life in which he wrote for voices and movement and an immediacy that through all his life up to now he had believed he would never experience. This new world was now within his grasp. But as suddenly, especially in the morning, he would become certain that the opposite was the case, that he would fail, and he would have to return, willingly and unwillingly, to his true medium: the printed page. He had never known such days of strange shifts and excitements.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“Nonetheless, he knew that in a novel it could not be risked: a character, once established, must remain in the narrative, unless the character were minor, or died before the story closed.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“Reading was as silent and solitary and private as writing. Now, he would hear people in the audience hold their breath, cry out, fall silent.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“She spoke with feeling, but as he watched her he sensed that he was listening to one of his actors enjoying her own performance. Sometimes she spoke as though she were telling an amusing anecdote about somebody else.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“Time would not relent, and when he was young, he had never imagined the pain that loss would bring, pain that only work and sleep could keep at bay now.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“The moral is the most pragmatic we can imagine, that life is a mystery, and that only sentences are beautiful, and that we must be ready for change”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master