70 quotes found
Author · Irish · 1945
Irish author (born 1945)
“I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.”
“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
“The secret of survival is a defective imagination.”
“Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think.”
“We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.”
“He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not e...”
“In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.”
“He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.”
“Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make ones living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilizatio...”
“Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search f...”
“How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.”
“Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back ti...”
“The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.”
“What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipw...”
“Although it was autumn and not summer the dark-gold sunlight and the inky shadows, long and slender in the shape of felled cypresses, were the same, and there was the same sense of everything drenc...”
“I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search fo...”
“You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, youll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. Youll think yo...”
“I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My ...”
“We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. That first death we witness will always be a murm...”
“Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.”
“Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all...”
“Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.”
