213 Quotes by John Banville

How is it that in childhood everything new that caught my interest had an aura of the uncanny, since according to all the authorities the uncanny is not some new thing but a thing known returning in a different form, become a revenant?

Everything in the room seemed turned away from me in sullen resistance, averthing itself from my unwelcome return.

We erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves – idealised, you know, but still recognisable – and then spend our lives engaged in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness.

I have this fantasy. I’m walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right.

It was not a wave but a smooth rolling swell that seemed to come up from the deeps, as if something vast down there had stirred itself.

The world is always ready to be amazed, but the self, that lynx-eyed monitor, sees all the subterfuges, all the cut corners, and is not deceived.

Lately I had been finding it hard to understand the simplest things people said to me, as if what they were speaking in were a form of language I did not recognise; I would know the words but could not assemble them into sense.

He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifference.