112 Quotes by Colm Tóibín

And then you’ll catch yourself thinking about something or someone who has no connection with the past. Someone who’s only yours. And you’ll realize… that this is where your life is.

She noticed then that Conor was watching her.'Are you going for a swim?' he asked her.'In a while. Why don't you go down and check if it's warm enough?''And if it's not warm enough?''We'll still go in. But at least we'll know.

We can all have plenty of lives, but there are limits. You never can tell what they are.

It is terrible to be an unprotected being.

It struck her that he might have told no one, not even his brothers, how he felt, and she thought how lonely that might have been for him.

None of them could help her. She had lost all of them. They would not find out about this; she would not put it into a letter. And because of this she understood that they would never know her now. Maybe, she thought, they had never known her, any of them, because if they had, then they would have had to realize what this would be like for her.

It was my companion, my strange friend who woke me in the night and again in the morning and who stayed close all day.

I promise you that I will not call. I have called you enough, and woken you enough times, in the years when we were together and in the years since then. But there are nights now in this strange, flat and forsaken place when those sad echoes and dim feelings come to me slightly more intensely than before. They are like whispers, or trapped whimpering sounds.

The memory of my name will last longer than the lives of many men.