The Lock-Up Quotes

“He turned on her a look of desolation, baffled and defenseless. Quirke thought of Goya’s painting of the little dog in the corrida. He had seen it years before in the Prado and had never forgotten it.”
― John Banville, The Lock-Up

“Faded, yes. Reduced in substance. He seemed not entirely there, to others or to himself. He was preoccupied, absentminded, always distracted. His manner was that of a man constantly patting his pockets in search of something he had lost, or misplaced, or only imagined had been there in the first place.”
― John Banville, The Lock-Up

“He was pumped full of grief and a kind of pent-up, seething rage against the world in general and his immediate surroundings in particular. His presence in it made the room seem small, small and confined.”
― John Banville, The Lock-Up

“The thing about grief was that you could press upon it at its sharpest points and blunt them, only for the bluntness to spread throughout the system and make it ache like one vast bruise.”
― John Banville, The Lock-Up

“moorhen swam on the water, delicately unzipping the placid surface as it went, her half-grown chicks strung out in a line behind her, bobbing along.”
― John Banville, The Lock-Up

“El trabajo le hará libre.”
― Benjamin Black, Las hermanas Jacobs