Snow Quotes

“How strange a thing it was to be here, animate and conscious, on this ball of mud and brine as it whirled through the illimitable depths of space.”
― John Banville, Snow

“It's an actual fucking library, and there's a body in it!”
― John Banville, Snow

“Rounding a bend, they almost ran into a flock of sheep, tended by a boy in a coat that was far too big for him and belted at the waist with a twist of yellow binder twine. Reck stopped the van and the two men sat stranded amid a moving sea of dirty gray fleece. Strafford idly studied the milling animals, admiring their long aristocratic heads and the neat little hoofs, like carved nuggets of coal, on which they trotted so daintily. He was struck too by their protuberant and intelligent-seeming shiny black eyes, expressive of stoical resignation tinged with the incurable shame of their plight, avatars of an ancient race, being herded ignominiously along a country road by a snot-nosed brat with a stick.”
― John Banville, Snow

“time had become a different medium, moving not in a seamless flow, but jerkily, now speeding up, now slowing to an underwater pace. It was as if he had strayed onto another plane, onto another planet, where the familiar, earthbound rules had all been suspended.”
― John Banville, Snow

“Something passed fleetingly over his face, like the shadow of a cloud skimming across a hillside on a windy day.”
― John Banville, Snow

“I'm a priest for Christ's sake - how can this be happening to me?”
― John Banville, Snow

“His years as a policeman had taught him to be not fearless, only to disregard the fact of being afraid.”
― John Banville, Snow

“His life was a state of peculiar calm, of tranquil equilibrium. His strongest drive was curiosity, the simple wish to know, to be let in on what was hidden from others. Everything to him had the aspect of a cipher. Life was a mundane mystery, the clues to the solving of which were strewn all about, concealed or, far more fascinatingly, hidden in plain view, for all to see but for him alone to recognize. The dullest object could, for him, flare into sudden significance, could throb in the sudden awareness of itself.”
― John Banville, Snow

“confess to an aversion to the brassicas, myself, and in particular”—he sank his voice to a shuddering whisper—“the Brussels sprout.”
― John Banville, Snow

“a shade of purplish-red, and there was a blue sheen on the back of his hands. In the”
― John Banville, Snow

“The living live, the dead are dead.”
― John Banville, Snow

“The book is one of our great inventions as a species.”
― John Banville, Snow

“The glimmering landscape materialized slowly before him. Such stillness. He might have been the last man in the world.”
― John Banville, Snow

“his father was still living, and the living require more thought.”
― John Banville, Snow

“if you’re prepared to eat them, you must be prepared to murder them.”
― John Banville, Snow

“Some people make it their life’s work, being unhappy.”
― John Banville, Snow

“Bushmills was supposedly the whiskey favored by Protestants, while Jameson’s was the Catholics’ choice.”
― John Banville, Snow

“The policeman insists that there be a plot. However, life itself is plotless.”
― John Banville, Snow

“Good manners were a part of his inheritance, like left-handedness or hemophilia.”
― John Banville, Snow

“No one cared enough, not really, for all the kind words and the mournful smiles they lavished upon the bereaved.”
― John Banville, Snow

“Helpless nostalgia was the curse of his steadily dwindling caste.”
― John Banville, Snow

“Try as he might, he did not have it in him to care enough for her distress. Yet what of it? No one cared enough, not really, for all the kind words and the mournful smiles they lavished upon the bereaved. The living live, the dead are dead. He almost heard his father’s soft, heartless chuckle.”
― John Banville, Snow