You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, youโll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. Youโll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, youโll weep for nothing, pine for whatโs not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.
John BanvilleThere are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.
John BanvilleAnd indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
John BanvilleI have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us.
John Banville