Home > Author > Colm Tóibín
101 " Once more she noted the hectoring tone, as though she were a child, unable to make proper decisions. "
― Colm Tóibín , Nora Webster
102 " Greta Wickham. He used to say if only Nora and Greta were here now, we wouldn’t be in this mess, even when there was no mess at all.” “Oh, he talked very warmly about you,” Peggy interjected, “and William Junior and Thomas had nothing but good words to say about Maurice Webster when he was teaching them. I remember one day Thomas had a temperature and we all wanted him to stay in bed and he wouldn’t, oh no he wouldn’t, because he had a double commerce class with Mr. Webster that he could not miss. You know they wanted Thomas to stay in Dublin when he qualified. Oh, he got offers with very good prospects! We told him he should consider "
103 " more she thought about it the more she came "
104 " woman who had not told him or anybody "
― Colm Tóibín , Brooklyn
105 " That was not even ten years ago, it might have been six or seven years ago, and if anyone had told her that she would be standing here now listening to this song and all the things that had happened between then and now, she would not have believed them. "
106 " In future, she hoped, fewer people would call. In future, once the boys went to bed, she might have the house to herself more often. She would learn how to spend these hours. In the peace of these winter evenings, she would work out how she was going to live. "
107 " It occurred to her that he had thought more closely about her over the previous few years than she had about him. She wondered if that could be true. She knew that how she felt affected him, and now, for the first time, how he felt seemed more urgent, more worthy of attention than any of her feelings. All she could do was to let him know and make him believe that she would do everything she promised to do. "
108 " That which interest me above all else,' he wrote,'is the caligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of the grass. "
― Colm Tóibín , Homage to Barcelona
109 " And, in return, when I get sick, you can come out and look after me when the others get fed up of me. That’s what we are all for. "
110 " [...] all my life when I have seen more than two men together I have seen foolishness and I have seen cruelty, but it is foolishness that I have noticed first. "
― Colm Tóibín , The Testament of Mary
111 " people shouting that if he could heal the sick and make the crippled walk and the blind see, then he could raise the dead. "
112 " She loved them, each of them, and found the differences between the four brothers intriguing, but sometimes she found the pleasure of being alone after a lunch or a supper with them greater than the pleasure of the meal itself. "
113 " But that will be the beginning.” “Of what?” I asked. “Of a new life for the world, "
114 " She tried to think of Tony now as a loving and comforting presence, but she saw instead someone she was allied with whether she liked it or not, someone who was, she thought, unlikely to allow her to forget the nature of the alliance and his need for her to return. "
115 " For each day, she thought, she needed a whole other day to contemplate what had happened and store it away, get it out of her system so that it did not keep her awake at night or fill her dreams with flashes of what had actually happened and other flashes that had nothing to do with anything familiar, but were full of rushes of colour or crowds of people, everything frenzied and fast. "
116 " And she saw all three of them—Tony, Jim, her mother—as figures whom she could only damage, as innocent people surrounded by light and clarity, and circling around them was herself, dark, uncertain. "
117 " He was the boy I had given birth to and he was more defenceless now than he had been then. "
118 " Trollope and Balzac, Zola and Dickens would, he felt, have become bitter old preachers, or mad hairy schoolmasters had they been born in New England and condemned to live amongst its people. "
― Colm Tóibín , The Master
119 " his legs where the bones had been broken, "
120 " I have been acquainted with the smell of death. The sickly, sugary smell that wafted in the wind towards the rooms in this palace. It is easy now for me to feel peaceful and content. "
― Colm Tóibín , House of Names