Deirdre Madden QUOTES

1 " But this was the first occasion I had come across someone for whom art was a means of avoiding reality rather than confronting it head on, an idea so strange to me that I didn't fully comprehend it at the time. "

― Deirdre Madden , Molly Fox's Birthday

2 " I watched plays with the kind of voracity with which small children read books; with the same visceral passion, the same complete trust in the imagination which is so difficult to sustain through the course of one's whole life. "

― Deirdre Madden , Molly Fox's Birthday

3 " I realise that a certain school of thought says that who we are is something we construct for ourselves. We build our self out of what we think we remember. "

― Deirdre Madden , Molly Fox's Birthday

4 " It is a kind of geisha containment, a shutteredness, a withdrawal and negation. It's as if she is capable of sensing when people are on the point of knowing who she is and she sends them a subliminal denial. "

― Deirdre Madden

5 " Rejection only made the attachment stronger. I realized that the impossibility of connection was a driving force behind his desire. "

― Deirdre Madden

6 " I realize that a certain school of thought
says that who we are is something we construct for ourselves. We build ourselves out of what we think we remember, what we believe to be true about our life; and the possessions we gather around us are supposedly a part of this, that we are, to some extent what we own. "

― Deirdre Madden , Molly Fox's Birthday

7 " I had been here during heavy rain, the kind of rain that becomes pleasurable to watch because it makes of the house a haven. The rooms in which one moves become a world apart from the wet streets, the sodden garden. "

― Deirdre Madden , Molly Fox's Birthday

8 " Dark feelings can become a habit. And if they're strong enough, like many strong feelings, they can even be enjoyable. "

― Deirdre Madden , Molly Fox's Birthday

9 " Sometimes the most important and powerful element is an absence, a lack, a burnished space in your mind that glows and aches as you try to fill it. "

― Deirdre Madden , Molly Fox's Birthday

10 " I write about subectivety-and inarticulation-about life pushing you into a state where everything is melting until you're left with the absolute and you can find neither the words nor the images to express it. "

― Deirdre Madden

11 " She began to think of all the people in Belfast who were drinking or drugging themselves into bearable insensibility that night. People would be hitting other people in the face with broken bottles. People were avowing and making love to people for whom they truly cared nothing; other people were screaming hatred at those whom they really did love. People were destroying things, daubing walls with paint and breaking up telephone boxes; joy-riding stolen cars into stone walls. In hospitals and homes, people were watching others dying, hoping and praying that the inevitable would not happen, while other people were planning murder. People elsewhere were trying to commit suicide, fumbling with change for the gas meter or emptying brown plastic bottles of their pills and tablets, which were bitter and dry in the mouth.

And there are, she thought, there must be, people who think as I do. "

― Deirdre Madden , Hidden Symptons

12 " There's something almost weightless about our world, I think, something fleeting and insubstantial that's ill at ease with any pretence of certainty. "

― Deirdre Madden , Molly Fox's Birthday

13 " I suppose what's similar about being on actor and being a priest is a certain perception of time. Eternity is a priest's business. But we all live in time. And what I'm doing is trying to make people aware of how the two coexist. That's what religion is, keeping that sense of eternity while being in time; trying to live accordingly. The Kingdom of God is here, now. That's what that's all about. "

― Deirdre Madden , Molly Fox's Birthday

14 " Being able to understand it was of no great importance. We see no visions because we live in an age in which they are not permitted; but if we accepted the idea of them, who's to say what we wouldn't see? Marriage is no longer a mystical union but a social contract. "

― Deirdre Madden , Molly Fox's Birthday

15 " It was strange that someone whose need to worship was so intense could be so dismissive of religion. "

― Deirdre Madden , Molly Fox's Birthday

16 " I had been here during heavy rain, the kind of rain that becomes pleasurable to watch because it makes of the house of a haven. The rooms in which one moves become a world apart from the wet streets, the sodden garden. "

― Deirdre Madden , Molly Fox's Birthday

17 " The one thing Andrew couldn't do for his son was to protect him from what he himself was, from the strange evolution and deep grief of his own life. "

― Deirdre Madden , Molly Fox's Birthday

18 " In the apprehension of art there can be a loneliness, as there so often is in its creation. This breaching of loneliness may be the secret of what an audience is, or at least one of its secrets. "

― Deirdre Madden , Molly Fox's Birthday

19 " From that day on, Belfast was poisoned for her. She could not conceive of Francis's killer as an indifividual, as a person who might be arrested, tried and punished, but only as a great darkness which was hidden in the hearts of everyone she met. It was as if the act of murder was so dreadful that the person who committed it had forfeited his humanity and had been reduced to the level of pure evil. He had dragged that world down with him: eveyone was guilty. "

― Deirdre Madden , Hidden Symptons

20 " Everything we suffer has been suffered before, everything that gives us joy has been enjoyed before. Nothing is new: but that doesn't make it any easier to suffer. "

― Deirdre Madden , Hidden Symptons

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