Colm Toibin Quotes

I wonder if anyone will ever know the emptiness of my life. Personal Diary -- Last entry Oh whats the point?

Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.

I have been loved, Edward told the stars. So? said the stars. What difference does that make when you are all alone now?

Nothing matters. Nothing matters.

I felt alone on the planet, drifting through the cosmos. With both hands I reached out to the night. There was no answer. Or maybe I just couldn't hear it.

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.

How hard could it be? Is it really going to hurt? You get into that deep well of emotion if you are by yourself. Why am I here? What's the point of going on? If I can't do what I want to do, then what's the point?

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.

Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes.

Oh, what a void there is in things.

It's really easy to slide into a depression fueled by the pointlessness of existence.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

A nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.

If I was to say I had a life, that would be a lie.

Sometimes I'm not into being a human.

She said she was neither happy nor unhappy, and that was why she couldn't go on. Each person knows the extent of their own suffering, or the total absence of meaning in their lives.

Everything means nothing that is the only truth.

It was over now, and the meaningless world was tolerable and need not be explained. And never would it be, and how foolish I had ever been to think so.

I am, I said to no one there and no one heard at all, not even a chair.

Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is addictive.

All the horror is in just this -- that there is no horror. . . .

Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.

Then I felt that every inflection of my voice, every word in my mouth, was a lie, a play whose sole purpose was to cover emptiness and boredom. There was only one way I could avoid a state of despair and a breakdown. To be silent. And to reach behind the silence for clarity or at least try to collect the resources that might still be available to me.