All Down Darkness Wide Quotes

“What if it was myself, or that lost version of me, a flicker of the past — would I know his face, and would he know mine? All that time I had been haunted by him, and still I hardly knew what that self was, that version of me that existed before the world had said become, and I had answered in its language.”
― Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide

“When we buried him, we planted flowers on his grave, and every time I visited I saw that those flowers were my father, were made out of him. He was being born again into the earth, in a new form, and it wouldn't be long until all of his atoms were dispersed across the village, then the country, and then the world, carried off inside birds, growing into plants, and into butterflies. What was the garden, then, if not heaven, if not a place made up of everything that had been lost to us, if not an afterlife? After that, the whole world could be heaven to me.”
― Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide

“There was desperation in his eyes. As he looked at me, it was as though he were looking into me from another world, trying to reach across some void, but everything he said was somehow falling short, not quite carrying its meaning across.”
― Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide

“That early sense of shame went underground: in protecting myself, in choosing which parts of myself to hide and which to magnify, I fragmented myself. I made a hierarchy of each facet of my identity, and at the bottom of the shaky, unstable tower I called 'myself' there was a little locked box.”
― Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide

“Krehká podstata šťastia spočíva v tom, že nikdy netrvá dlho,... s. 208”
― Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide

“Prvý raz som pocítil, aké je to byť objektom túžby, nie iba túžiť. s.40”
― Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide

“Ik vroeg me af of ik wel klaar was om met hem mee te gaan, of ik wel klaar was om die ene stap verder te zetten in het nieuwe leven dat ik weg van huis begon te ontdekken. Hier was ik een volwassene; die hele wereld van goede en slechte keuzes ging voor me open.”
― Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide

“Omdat ik nu eenmaal was wie ik ben, had ik al vroeg de heimelijke tactieken van het conformisme begrepen: hoe je een slis verhult, een al te uitgesproken tred corrigeert, je stem een paar tonen lager zet, zaken waarin ik me tijdens mijn puberteit wekenlang oefende op mijn kamer. Maar het was pas op mijn zeventiende dat ik, vrij frontaal, op een non-conformiteit stuitte waar ik me niet zomaar uit kon wurmen. Ik besefte toen, duidelijker dan ooit te voren, hoezeer de wereld me - nog voor ikzelf het begreep - in aangeboren tegenstelling had geplaatst. (P15)”
― Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide

“Omdat ik nu eenmaal was wie ik ben, had ik al vroeg de heimelijke tactieken van het conformisme begrepen: hoe je een slis verhult, een al te uitgesproken tred corrigeert, je stem een paar tonen lager zet, zaken waarin ik me tijdens mijn puberteit wekenlang oefende op mijn kamer. Maar het was pas op mijn zeventiende dat ik, vrij frontaal, op een non-conformiteit stuitte waar ik me niet zomaar uit kon wurmen. Ik besefte toen, duidelijker dan ooit te voren, hoezeer de wereld me - nog voor ikzelf het begreep - in aangeboren tegenstelling had geplaatst. (P.15)”
― Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide

“When they said, 'I'm just scared that you'll be unhappy', what I really felt they were saying was 'I am scared that if you continue being yourself, we will make you unhappy.”
― Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide

“By some instinct, when the world had blocked my path, I went out and made a new one; and it happened that the one I made was already there, already marked out by others, only it was invisible to me, as though all those men were speaking through me, moving me, haunting me, guiding me on. Perhaps that is why I feel so close to them, a sort of familial closeness — where they went I followed, and the further I went, the more I felt them watching over me. As I moved forward, I also moved back, looping history inside myself, listening to them, communing with them. When I could not speak to anyone, I spoke with them.”
― Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide

“Whatever my mind had been filled with before, I could not recall. It was as though, looking into the dark, the dark itself had begun to move. The regions I had thought uninhabited were now beginning to rouse, the emptiness blooming into a hundred alien shapes. What before was transparent was now crawling, filling and overfilling so that the clear grammar of my thought was submerged by half-formed things.”
― Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide