Benjamin Black > Quotes

“All the same, she wondered if they did know what she thought and felt, if they knew without knowing, in that way the Irish were so adept at doing.”
― Benjamin Black, Vengeance

“When you think of the material God has to work with,” he said, “you have to feel sorry for Him, sometimes.”
― Benjamin Black, Christine Falls

“suerte de mundo paralelo y regido por una especie humana más formidable y”
― Benjamin Black, El secreto de Christine

“Love was love, and always demanded more than a lover was capable of giving.”
― Benjamin Black, Holy Orders

“How they wait to ambush us, our true emotions”
― Benjamin Black, Elegy for April

“In the hallway of the house there was the usual smell he could never identify, brownish, exhausted, a breath out of childhood, if childhood was the word for that first decade of misery he had suffered through.”
― Benjamin Black, Christine Falls

“You can know something and at the same time not know it. It’s one of the things that help us put up with our lot in life and not go crazy”
― Benjamin Black, The Black-Eyed Blonde

“The boy was still there, inside the young man’s body. It was the same with all of them, all the men she had ever known, in her family or outside it; they reverted to childhood when they were hurt, or sad, or in trouble.”
― Benjamin Black, Vengeance

“Physically, too, he had faded, his features become indistinct, as if a fine sifting of dust had settled uniformly over him.”
― Benjamin Black, The Silver Swan

“Patología, Wilkins y Sinclair, sus ayudantes, intercambiaron”
― Benjamin Black, El secreto de Christine

“He would have found it hard to like this unnervingly self-contained young man, if liking was what was required, and happily it was not.”
― Benjamin Black, The Silver Swan

“The day was at an end and the sea was lacquered with streaks of sapphire and leek green and lavender gray under a violet dome of sky.”
― Benjamin Black, The Silver Swan

“Yo tenía esa edad en la que el menor gesto de bondad parece una prueba de amistad eterna.”
― Benjamin Black, Los lobos de Praga

“the usual smell he could never identify, brownish, exhausted, a breath out of childhood,”
― Benjamin Black, Christine Falls

“el mundo me parecía un lugar de posibilidades, de oportunidades; al igual que él, consideraba el destino no una fuerza fija sino maleable.”
― Benjamin Black, Los lobos de Praga

“importunately”
― Benjamin Black, Christine Falls

“four o’clock the daylight was already curling insidious fingers round the edges of the curtains in his bedroom. He”
― Benjamin Black, The Silver Swan

“louche”
― Benjamin Black, The Silver Swan

“¿Sabéis su definición de un embajador? «Un caballero honrado enviado al extranjero a mentir”
― Benjamin Black, Los lobos de Praga

“He preferred his own judgments and, if the truth were told, his own company, too. That was how he had always been, even as a boy, always by himself, stravaging the fields or the back streets of the Midlands town where he was born, looking for something and never knowing what, hoping to chance on something, anything at all, that would interest or amuse him.”
― Benjamin Black, The Silver Swan

“And yet the glow, that inward glow, that was a thing he did not wish to live without, whatever the state of his liver or his brain.”
― Benjamin Black, Vengeance

“cada cual se labra su propia suerte, o bien otros, por lo general idiotas, la labran por él.”
― Benjamin Black, Pecado

“prehensile”
― Benjamin Black, Christine Falls

“era el símbolo, la imagen misma de la propia Praga, llamativa, siniestra y deforme.”
― Benjamin Black, Los lobos de Praga

“on left turns she leaned so far to the side that Quirke felt stray tendrils of her hair touch his cheek like filaments of charged electric wire.”
― Benjamin Black, Christine Falls

“Mal Griffin, Sarah, él mismo a los veinte años, y Delia, su futura esposa,”
― Benjamin Black, El secreto de Christine

“Somewhere along that difficult way he seemed to have got lost.”
― Benjamin Black, Christine Falls

“La imaginación tiene sus propios motivos y nos los oculta.”
― Benjamin Black, Los lobos de Praga

“He knew very well he should not be drinking whiskey so early in the evening. In fact, he should not be drinking spirits at all. He had promised Phoebe he would keep to wine only, and that even wine he would take in moderation, yet here he was, breaking that promise. It was a familiar sensation, this slight buzz of shame at the back of his mind. There were certain conditions, most of them bad, that had become ingrained in him over the years, so that now he could not imagine his life without them. First and foremost of these conditions was dislike of himself, a mild but irresolvable distaste for what he did and what he was. In his better moments, his rare self-absolving moments, he regarded this permanent state of self-deprecation as, paradoxically, a sign of some virtue. For if he disapproved of himself, must there not be a finer side to him, however firmly it was turned away, that was doing the disapproving? Surely the truly wicked ones thought nothing of their wickedness, were not even aware of it, or if they were they gloried in it, like Iago or Milton’s Satan. Of course, by maintaining a low regard for himself he was giving himself the excuse to carry on as he wished to, with no thought for anyone else. Being bad, as he was, and as he acknowledged he was, lifted a weight of responsibility from his soul. I do as I do and can do no other. That was a motto a man could live with.”
― Benjamin Black, Vengeance

“Humans build square, Quirke thought, nature in the round.”
― Benjamin Black, The Silver Swan