4 Quotes by David Constantine

So quiet that house was in the night, so quiet all the other little homes around it were that held the elderly in them and the old alone or still in couples sleeping early, waking, lying awake and thinking about the past. So much past every night in the silence settling over those houses that all looked much the same on a hillside creeping up against the rock and gorse and tipping down to the river where it widened, widened and ended in the sea.

The truth is, we live among fictions. All our thinking, feeling, and writing makes up versions of what we like to call reality; and our versions are subject to continual alteration with the passage of time and under the impress of other people's versions. Novels and poems, which are fictions made of the stuff of life, again and again will alter our decided versions of the lives we have lived and are living now.

In the night, in the utter silence of the nights among those little houses where old people live, she felt him leave the bed and in the pitch-black reach his dressing gown and leave the room. She let him go. How it troubled her, all this. Not much to ask, peace of mind at nights and a bit of ordinary cheerfulness in the day, some conversation, something to laugh about and doing nobody any harm. And not all this. A slit of light came on under the bedroom door.

When Hölderlin’s Oedipus and Antigone appeared in spring 1804, the learnèd said at once that they must be the work of a madman.