{"author":"John Banville","author_id":"John+Banville","total_quotes":27,"quotes":[{"text":"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 time and bring the dead to life? None. None possible, not in the real world. And yet in my imaginings I can clearly see this cleansed new creature steaming up out of myself like a proselyte rising drenched from the baptismal river amid glad cries.","author":"John Banville","tags":["atonement","dreams","forgiveness","forgiveness","ghosts","imagination","john-banville","past","regret","regrets","time"],"id":30190,"author_id":"John+Banville"},{"text":"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.","author":"John Banville","tags":["characters","writers-on-writing","writing"],"id":43528,"author_id":"John+Banville"},{"text":"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.","author":"John Banville","tags":["acceptance","death","grief","immortality","life-goes-on","loss","memory","mourning","sorrow"],"id":61020,"author_id":"John+Banville"},{"text":"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 for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say a shocking, realization. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet.","author":"John Banville","tags":["irish-writers","john-banville","literature"],"id":65353,"author_id":"John+Banville"},{"text":"In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.","author":"John Banville","tags":["writing"],"id":73728,"author_id":"John+Banville"},{"text":"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 drenched and jewelled and the same ultramarine glitter on the sea. I felt inexplicably lightened; it was as if the evening, in all the drench and drip of its fallacious pathos, had temporarily taken over from me the burden of grieving.","author":"John Banville","tags":["grief","mourning","vivid","weather"],"id":74699,"author_id":"John+Banville"},{"text":"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 even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.","author":"John Banville","tags":["death","emptyness","fear","human"],"id":85807,"author_id":"John+Banville"},{"text":"You know, artists don't really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience that we do have.","author":"John Banville","tags":["life","small","know "],"id":87118,"author_id":"John+Banville"},{"text":"Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.","author":"John Banville","tags":["dawn","gods"],"id":130297,"author_id":"John+Banville"},{"text":"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 for a sign of rescue.","author":"John Banville","tags":["emotional-vision","environmental-sadness","fen","landscape","loneliness","marsh","sadness"],"id":139403,"author_id":"John+Banville"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":27,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}