The Blue Guitar Quotes

“This is the way it is with me, always looking in or looking out, a chilly pane of glass between me and a remote and longed-for world.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“Happy sadness, sad happiness, the story of my life and loves”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“The pleasures of acquisition are well known—says the thief, the former thief—but who ever mentions the quiet joy of letting things go?”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“Do other people, remembering their parents, feel, as I do, a sense of having inadvertently done a small though significant, irreversible wrong?”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“A married couple never seem so married as when viewed from the back seat of a motor car, talking quietly together in the front. Polly and Marcus might have been in their bedroom already, so soft and intimate their converse sounded to me, as I sat there alertly mute behind the backs of their heads”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“Lots of water under that bridge, let’s not drown ourselves in it.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“… a thief’s heart is an impetuous organ, and while inwardly he throbs for absolution, at the same time he can’t keep from bragging.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“And anyway, who’s to say that what we see when we’re drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“Wonderful, how an injection of pure speculation—never mind the questionable logic—icy-cold and colourless as a shot of opium, can deaden briefly even the worst of afflictions. Briefly.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“However, I had gone only a little way when I heard a call and turned to see Olive running after me with something in her hand. Churning along that high pavement in her apron and cardigan and her old felt slippers, she bore with her, I saw with a shock, a whole family of resemblances: my parents were there, mother as well as father, and my dead brother, and I, too, I was there, and so was my lost child, my lost little daughter, and a host of others, whom I knew but only half recognised. This is how the dead come back, borne by the living, to throng us round, pale ghosts of themselves and of us.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“We have had quite a time of it, quite a time. I move, when I move, in a daze of bafflement. It’s as if I had been standing for all my life in front of a full-length mirror, watching the people passing by, behind and in front of me, and now someone had taken me roughly by the shoulders and spun me about, and behold! There it was, the unreflected world, of people and things, and I nowhere to be seen in it. I might as well have been the one who died.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“I hadn’t eaten anything at lunch, yet I wasn’t hungry. The belly knows when it’s not going to be fed and, like an old dog, settles down to sleep. That’s how it is, I find, with the creature and its comforts, so that all is not ill, and sometimes the Lord does temper the wind to the shorn lamb.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“It sometimes occurs to me that everything I do is a substitute for something else, and that every venture I embark on is a botched attempt at reparation for a thing done or left undone—don’t ask me to explain it.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“was years later that Gloria turned to me and said out of the blue—what blue? black, more like—“You know I can’t forgive you, don’t you?” She spoke in a mild, conversational tone, seemingly without rancour, indeed without emotion of any kind that I could register; it was simply a fact she was stating, a circumstance she was apprising me of. When I made to protest she cut me off, gently but firmly. “I know,” she said. “I know what you’ll say, only there has to be someone for me not to forgive, and it’s you. Do you mind?”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“... something inside me seemed to shift and slide, and for a moment I felt nauseous, and panic sent a hot bead rolling down my spine. ... Slowly the nausea gave way to a stifling sensation, as if an invisible caul were being pulled down over my head and shoulders.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“The rain had turned sleety, and swarmed and slithered on the windscreen like blown spit. Trees loomed blankly before us, and rents appeared in the clouds, burning white glares within a dull grey surround, though the wind quickly sealed them up again.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“The world’s first task, as I knew well, a task it never relaxed from, was to undo me. I was even afraid of the sky.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“have the impression, and I credit it, that in certain cases a union is no sooner forged than the seed of separation sprouts.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“Do other people, remembering their parents, feel, as I do, a sense of having inadvertently done a small though significant, irreversible wrong? I think of my father’s worn shoes, of that cardigan with the drooping pockets, of his stringy neck wobbling inside a shirt-collar that lately had become three or four sizes too big for him, and it is as if I had woken up to find that while asleep I had put to death some small, defenceless creature, the last one, the very last, of its marvellous species.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“Tal vez el amor no nace ahí, no en un repentino arrebato de passion, sino en el reconocimiento y la sencilla aceptación de, de algo que no sé qué es”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“The fact is, whenever I made an overture to a woman, which I seldom did, even in my young days, I never really expected it to be entertained, or even noticed, despite certain instances of success, which I tended to regards as flukes, the result of misunderstanding, or dimness on the part of the woman and simple good fortune on mine. I’m not an immediately alluring specimen, having been, for a start, the runt of the litter. I’m short and stout, or better go the whole hog and say fat, with a big head and tiny feet. My hair is of a shade somewhere between wet rust and badly tarnished brass, and in damp weather, or when I’m by the seaside, clenches itself into curls that are as tight and dense as cauliflower florets and stubbornly resistant to fiercest combings. My skin – oh, my skin! – is a flaccid, moist, off-white integument, so that I look as if I had been blanched in the dark for a long time. Of my freckles I shall not speak”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar