Colm Toibin Quotes

#1. Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

Colm Toibin

#2. I was first in Sydney in 1993, and have been a few times since then. For someone who didn't know Australia, it came as a shock how intelligent, interesting and funny the people were. If I lived there I might see it differently, but as a visitor it was a lot of fun.

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#3. Finally, she let herself feel how much she had lost, how much she would miss.

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#4. That which interest me above all else,' he wrote,'is the caligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of the grass.

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#5. Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.

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#6. I've never put Northern Ireland into a novel because it's not my territory. I come from the South, so my imaginative territory is very much the Republic of Ireland rather than the North. Even though, if I wrote a novel about the North, it might sell more.

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#7. I did think of becoming a priest quite late on, when other boys were thinking of knocking over fences and going out with girls. I would have made a very good bishop: nice housekeeper, nice clothes - god, the clothes.

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#8. 'One Minus One' and 'Barcelona, 1975' are more or less autobiographical.

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#9. woman who had not told him or anybody

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#10. I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.

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#11. Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

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#12. in this waking time his presence, once so solid, lacked any substance or form; it was merely a shadow at the edge of every moment of the day and night.

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#13. While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

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#14. So this was what being alone was like, she thought. ... It was this wandering in a sea of people with the anchor lifted, and all of it oddly pointless and confusing.

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#15. 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.

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#16. Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

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#17. The only routine I have is that I finish everything I start. I wake up early every day - about 6.30 A.M. - but I do not work every day. I could laze for a day or two, but I wouldn't do it for three.

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#18. The idea that what had happened could be erased, that the burden that was on her now could be lifted, that the past could be restored and could make its way effortlessly into a painless present.

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#19. If you don't make mistakes, they'll notice you and they'll get to like you,' she added. Eilis

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#20. She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

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#21. Describe character using dialogue. Describe character using what the characters see or do or think, but not what they had done or where they had been.

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#22. For a while she was quietly resigned to the prospect that nothing would change, but she did not know what the consequences would be, or what form they would take.

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#23. You have to keep writing. It's almost like practice, almost like tennis, that actually after a few days of not writing, first of all it makes you slightly depressed and uneasy, but it also affects the style when you start up again. You need to get the show on the road.

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#24. 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.

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#25. It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world.

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#26. Look at Austen. In her novels, you get a dance, followed by an encounter, followed by a letter, then a period of solitude. No flashbacks and no backstory. Let's have no more back story!

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#27. What she would need to do in the days before she left and on the morning of her departure was smile, so that they would remember her smiling. *

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#28. 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.

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#29. Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

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#30. All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

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#31. the problem for her was that she was on her own now and that she had no idea how to live.

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#32. Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.

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#33. And then it occurred to her that she was already feeling that she would need to remember this room, her sister, this scene, as though from a distance.

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#34. Dreams belong to each of us alone, just as pain does.

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#35. She felt almost guilty that she had handed some of her grief to him, and then she felt close to him for his willingness to take it and hold it, in all its rawness, all its dark confusion.

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#36. I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels.

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#37. What she loved most about America, Eilis thought on these mornings, was how the heating was kept on all night.

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#38. We can all have plenty of lives, but there are limits. You never can tell what they are.

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#39. When a book comes from the publisher and you see it for the first time ... Of course it's not remotely like seeing a baby for the first time, but I can remember with each book what room I was in when I opened it. That would be excitement, though, I think. Not pride.

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#40. In the morning, she was not sure that she had slept as much as lived a set of vivid dreams, letting them linger so that she would not have to open her eyes and see the room.

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#41. The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.

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#42. I'm hungry." "We're all hungry. But, darling, you don't need to look hungry. Pretend you are full." "And

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#43. 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.

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#44. It is terrible to be an unprotected being.

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#45. It was like the arrival of night when you knew that you would never see anything in daylight again.

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#46. We had used up all of our time. And I wondered if that made any difference to my mother then, as she lay awake in the hospital those last few nights of her life: we had used up all of our time.

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#47. The best thing about New York is working late into the night. At 1 in the morning on a Saturday, to be still working, there's an immense satisfaction in being enclosed by it.

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#48. Eilis was fascinated by [ ... ] his sweet duplicity in giving no sign of what had happened before. She was almost glad to know that he had secrets and had ways of calmly keeping them.

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#49. I lived in the Republic of Ireland. I wrote a book about the North but as an outsider. The hatreds there were not mine. I never felt them. I liked how open in most ways Catalan nationalism was, compared to Irish nationalism. I disliked the violence and cruelty in Ireland.

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#50. You learn, no matter what age you are, to keep things to yourself.

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#51. Memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain.

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#52. I first went to Barcelona in 1975 after university, and I stayed for three years. I learnt Catalan because that's what everyone speaks in the mountains. They speak English to foreigners, but what people say to each other is much more important than what they say to you.

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#53. You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.

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#54. From now on the architects would take over as the high preists of this bourgeois city.

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#55. The Roman Catholic Church and its rituals were so much part of life that, although my parents would often question a small matter of dogma and none of us seemed more religious than anyone else, no one ever questioned the rituals or the basic tenets of belief.

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#56. The boy became a man and left home and became a dying figure on a cross. I want to be able to imagine that what happened to him will not come, it will see us and decide - not now, not them. And we will be left in peace to grow old.

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#57. You never know what way life goes. Some of it makes no sense at all.

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#58. Once more she noted the hectoring tone, as though she were a child, unable to make proper decisions.

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#59. That was not even ten years ago, it might have been six or seven years ago, and if anyone had told her that she would be standing here now listening to this song and all the things that had happened between then and now, she would not have believed them.

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#60. My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.

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#61. I don't think we have a right to enjoy our neuroses; in fact, I believe that we have a duty not to. But we cannot walk away from ourselves. Who else is there to become?

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#62. Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.

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#63. I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

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#64. Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep - it can't be done abruptly.

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#65. When I was 19, I thought I wanted to be an English civil servant. It was the most exotic thing at the time - can you imagine, in the middle of the IRA bombing campaigns? I saw an ad inviting Irish applicants for an induction course, so I signed up.

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#66. I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.

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#67. History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.

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#68. Solitude is good in the evening. Dublin is a quiet city when you get to a certain age, when your friends settle down and have kids. Nothing much happens here.

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#69. Life is but a day and expresses mainly a single note.

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#70. John McGovern taught me that it's OK to write repeatedly about the same things.

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#71. What is hard to understand is that our dreams matter

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#72. Time and patience would bring a snail to America,' he repeated.

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#73. I remember too much; I am like the air on a calm day as it holds itself still, letting nothing escape.

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#74. I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

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#75. I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

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#76. We keep our prices low and our manners high. -Miss Bartocci

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#77. If water can be changed into wine and the dead can be brought back, then I want time pushed back.

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#78. more she thought about it the more she came

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#79. He was delighted by things, as he was delighted by her, and he had done nothing else ever but make that clear.

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#80. For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.

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#81. 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.

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#82. People's interest in glamour and clothes and nylon stockings and all those things were, when I was a little boy, the sort of world that I listened to.

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#83. We walk among them sometimes, the ones who have left us. They are filled with something that none of us knows yet. It is a mystery.

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#84. I don't come out of an oral tradition, I come out of silence.

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#85. She explained to him that she had been homesick, and that Father Flood had inscribed her on the course as a way of making her busy, and how studying in the evening made her feel happy, or as happy as she had been since she had left home.

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#86. In skies of deepening blue the moon, heaven's queen was now afloat

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#87. And, in return, when I get sick, you can come out and look after me when the others get fed up of me. That's what we are all for.

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#88. I'm slightly influenced by sport in that I like the idea of trying, like an athlete, to keep absolutely ready. That's an emotional thing, almost. I don't mean physically, although I play tennis. But you try to keep yourself ready.

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#89. In the meantime, when I wake in the night, I want more. I want what happened not to have happened, to have taken another course.

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#90. People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away.

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#91. I still have a stammer that I can control by not opening a sentence with a hard consonant, or by concentrating for a moment, breathing softly down. Growing up, the 'Our Father' was lovely, made for me, the 'Hail Mary' was gorgeous, and 'Glory Be to the Father' was an absolute nightmare.

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#92. Wait until you're old, Nora," she said, "and then you'll know. It's the mixture of being content with even the smallest thing and then feeling a great dissatisfaction with everything.

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#93. I have,' Georgina said. 'I go home once a year to see my mam. It's a lot of suffering for a week. By the time I've recovered I have to go back. But I love seeing them all. We're not getting any younger, any of us, so it's nice to spend a week together.

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#94. She noticed then that Conor was watching her.
'Are you going for a swim?' he asked her.
'In a while. Why don't you go down and check if it's warm enough?'
'And if it's not warm enough?'
'We'll still go in. But at least we'll know.

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#95. She thought it was strange that the mere sensation of savouring the prospect of something could make her think for a while that is must be the prospect of home.

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#96. As I settled down to sleep in that new bed in the dark city, I saw that it was too late now, too late for everything. I would not be given a second chance. In the hours when I woke, I have to tell you that this struck me almost with relief.

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#97. If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

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#98. The rest of the time he entertained all the guilt that wished to call, carried in by the wind through the darkness, to enter his spirit ...

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#99. I think the whole business of people emigrating was that no one ever told them, although everyone knew, especially if it was to the United States, that it was forever, and the party before you left was called an 'American wake,' in the sense that they knew you wouldn't come back.

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#100. Eilis replied to say that it was not just Mrs Kehoe, who was not in any way extravagant, it was everyone in America, they all kept their heating on all night. As

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