John Banville Quotes

One day you're there and then all of a sudden, there's less of you. And you wonder where that part went. If it's living somewhere outside of you. And you keep thinking maybe you'll get it back. And then you realize it's just gone.

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

I wish I had had a great disappointment, a real one.

July 13, 1954 was the most tragic day of my life. I had lost my beloved Frida forever. To late now I realized that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida.

I think there is a part of life that I'm missing.

I lost my dad way too early and it was agonisingly awful. I missed him so much and I hated knowing that I could never again pick up the phone to tell him about my day.

What I find compelling is the moment in which people realize, with suffering and pain, that in the past there was a time when they were happy, because back then the present and the future coincided - they were one and the same thing.

Of joys departed, not to return, how painful the remembrance.

There are moments when the grief comes bubbling up. The first time I saw Chris's chair empty, that was really hard. And it was hard when I started folding up some of his sweaters that I so imagine him wearing.

You never realize the holes a person leaves behind until you fall into them.

What you had could never make up for what you'd lost.

There is no pain greater than this; not the cut of a jagged-edged dagger nor the fire of a dragon's breath. Nothing burns in your heart like the emptiness of losing something, someone, before you truly have learned of its value.

When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?

There’s a hollow where he used to be, and it echoes with self-imposed loss.

i felt her absence. it was like waking up one day with no teeth in your mouth. you wouldn't need to run to the mirror to know they were gone

Memories, even bittersweet ones, are better than nothing.

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.

People look to you to replace a part in their lives that they can't get back. You can't get the past back, you can't do it. We've all tried.

I wish my father had lived longer. He died when I was 18.

I'm incredibly sad that my mother's not here to see my kids and that my kids don't get to know her. And she didn't meet my husband. That's one of the hardest things. I don't even know how to put that into words.

There are holes in our lives that can never be filled - not really, not ever.

What I want back is what I was.

Our past is who we are, and death is one of our experiences. I lost my husband a long time ago, but it's always yesterday.

I envy the dead.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.