Home > Author > Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín QUOTES

Colm Tóibín QUOTES

141 " I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen. And yes, I suppose I was interested in that story in the gap between memory itself, the real business of being alive, and the imagination. "

― Colm Tóibín

142 " I do not care much about the mysteries of the universe, unless they come to me in words, or in music maybe, or in a set of colours, and then I entertain them merely for their beauty and only briefly. "

― Colm Tóibín

143 " I don't come out of an oral tradition, I come out of silence. "

― Colm Tóibín

144 " You know that you are the only person who shakes his head in exasperation when I insist on making jokes and small talk, when I refuse to be direct. No one else has ever minded this as you do. You are alone in wanting me always to say something that is true. I know now, as I walk towards the house I have rented here, that if I called and toldyou that the bitter past has come back to me tonight in these alien streets with a force that feels like violence, you would say that you are not surprised. You would wonder only why it has taken six years. "

― Colm Tóibín

145 " Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abruptly."

[Colm Tóibín, Novelist – Portrait of the Artist, The Guardian, 19 February 2013] "

― Colm Tóibín

146 " The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych."

[Colm Tóibín, Novelist – Portrait of the Artist, The Guardian, 19 February 2013] "

― Colm Tóibín

147 " ...in one of his Irish Times columns written under the name of Myles na gCopaleen, [Flann] O’Brien offered a service to readers who owned books but did not open them. For a fee, books would be handled, with passages underlined or spines damaged or words such as ‘Rubbish’ or ‘Yes, but cf Homer, Od. iii, 151’ or ‘I remember poor Joyce saying the same thing to me’ written in the margins. Or inscriptions on the title page such as ‘From your devoted friend and follower, K. Marx.’"

--"Flann O'Brien's Lies," Colm Tóibin, London Review of Books, Jan. 5, 2012 "

― Colm Tóibín

148 " As his widow, she knew who she was and what she had inherited. She had loved him in her way and sometimes missed him. She knew what words like "loved" and "missed" meant when she thought of her husband. When she thought of Blunt, on the other hand, she was unsure what anything meant except the sonnets she had written about their love affair. "

― Colm Tóibín

149 " I dreamed of setting it up out here in front of where I am sitting now, on the tripod that I would have ordered too, and starting, taking my time, to focus on a curling line of water, a piece of the world indifferent to the fact that there is language, that there are names to describe things, and grammar and verbs. My eye, solitary, filled with its own history, is desperate to evade, erase, forget; it is watching now, watching fiercely, like a scientist looking for a cure, deciding for some days to forget about words, to know at last that the words for colours, the blue-grey-green of the sea, the whiteness of the waves, will not work against thefullness of watching the rich chaos they yield and carry. "

― Colm Tóibín , The Empty Family: Stories

150 " I turned and moved fast, focusing swiftly on a wave I had selected for no reason. There was whiteness and grenyess in it and a sort of blue and green. It was a line. It did not toss, nor did it stay still. It was all movement, all spillage, but it was pure containment as well, utterly focused just as I was watching it. It had an elemental hold; it was something coming towards us as though to save us but it did nothing instead, it withdrew in a shurgging irony, as if to suggest that this is what the world is, and our time in it, all lifted possibility, all complexity and rushing fervour, to end in nothing on a small strand, and go back out to rejoin the empty family from whom we had set out alone with such a burst of brave unknowing energy. "

― Colm Tóibín

151 " The difference between the detailed plans he drew up and the house itself when finished, so filled with raked sea light, is the difference between the body and the soul, between musical notation and a song, between the idea for a drawing and the actual drawing itself. "

― Colm Tóibín , A Guest at the Feast

152 " There are not two Germanies, a bad one and a good one, but only one, in which the best qualities have been corrupted with diabolical cunning into evil. The evil Germany is the good one in misfortune and guilt, the good Germany perverted and overthrown. "

― Colm Tóibín , The Magician

153 " He presumed that they would deplore, as he did, the turning away from the principles that made a civilized society, which were, as he named them, ‘liberty, equality, education, optimism and belief in progress’. "

― Colm Tóibín , The Magician

154 " 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. "

― Colm Tóibín

155 " Murder makes us ravenous, fills the soul with satisfaction that is fierce and then luscious enough to create a taste for further satisfaction. "

― Colm Tóibín , House of Names

156 " You will be hearing from me,” she said, as he opened the door for her. “And you will find that when I am crossed I am very formidable. "

― Colm Tóibín

157 " If he were to be offered a chance to say a final word about the human spirit, he would like to do so comically, he thought; he would dramatize the idea that humans could not ever be trusted, that they could reverse their own story as the wind changed, that their lives were a continuous, enervating and amusing effort to appear plausible. And in that lay, he felt, the pure genius of humanity, and all the pathos. "

― Colm Tóibín , The Magician

158 " Well, I didn't really know what to say. So maybe I should say that I have thought about you and I like you, I like seeing you, I care for you and maybe I love you too. And the next time if you tell me you love me, I'll--"
She stopped.
"You'll what?"
"I'll say I love you too. "

― Colm Tóibín

159 " Making such leaps (into the dark) requires us to be brave and determined, but doing so may also freeze other possibilities. It is easier to renounce bravery, rather than be brave over and over. It could not, in her case, be done again. The will and the nerve needed for such actions do not come to us often, any of us, least of all Isabel Archer from Albany. "

― Colm Tóibín

160 " And I told Father Flood that since I would already be getting my reward in heaven, I have that nicely arranged, thank you, he owes me a favour that I would like repaid on this earth. "

― Colm Tóibín , Brooklyn