Deirdre Madden Quotes

#1. I write about subectivety-and inarticulation-about life pushing you into a state where everything is melting until you're left with the absolute and you can find neither the words nor the images to express it.

Deirdre Madden

#2. There's something almost weightless about our world, I think, something fleeting and insubstantial that's ill at ease with any pretence of certainty.

Deirdre Madden

#3. But this was the first occasion I had come across someone for whom art was a means of avoiding reality rather than confronting it head on, an idea so strange to me that I didn't fully comprehend it at the time.

Deirdre Madden

#4. Sometimes the most important and powerful element is an absence, a lack, a burnished space in your mind that glows and aches as you try to fill it.

Deirdre Madden

#5. It was strange that someone whose need to worship was so intense could be so dismissive of religion.

Deirdre Madden

#6. Being able to understand it was of no great importance. We see no visions because we live in an age in which they are not permitted; but if we accepted the idea of them, who's to say what we wouldn't see? Marriage is no longer a mystical union but a social contract.

Deirdre Madden

#7. In the apprehension of art there can be a loneliness, as there so often is in its creation. This breaching of loneliness may be the secret of what an audience is, or at least one of its secrets.

Deirdre Madden

#8. Rejection only made the attachment stronger. I realized that the impossibility of connection was a driving force behind his desire.

Deirdre Madden

#9. I watched plays with the kind of voracity with which small children read books; with the same visceral passion, the same complete trust in the imagination which is so difficult to sustain through the course of one's whole life.

Deirdre Madden

#10. Dark feelings can become a habit. And if they're strong enough, like many strong feelings, they can even be enjoyable.

Deirdre Madden

#11. I had been here during heavy rain, the kind of rain that becomes pleasurable to watch because it makes of the house a haven. The rooms in which one moves become a world apart from the wet streets, the sodden garden.

Deirdre Madden

#12. I realise that a certain school of thought says that who we are is something we construct for ourselves. We build our self out of what we think we remember.

Deirdre Madden

#13. The one thing Andrew couldn't do for his son was to protect him from what he himself was, from the strange evolution and deep grief of his own life.

Deirdre Madden

#14. It is a kind of geisha containment, a shutteredness, a withdrawal and negation. It's as if she is capable of sensing when people are on the point of knowing who she is and she sends them a subliminal denial.

Deirdre Madden