Colm Tóibín > Quotes

“Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep—it can't be done abruptly.”
― Colm Tóibín

“..Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to imagine. ”
― Colm Tóibín

“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.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“Some people are nice and if you talk to them properly, they can be even nicer.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“She has gone back to Brooklyn,' her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmire Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years already when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more.”
― Colm Toibín, Brooklyn

“Dreams belong to each of us alone, just as pain does.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“in skies of deepening blue
the moon, heaven's queen
was now afloat”
― Colm Tóibín

“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.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“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.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything. The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there. In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday. Nothing maybe except sleep, and she was not even certain she was looking forward to sleep. In any case, she could not sleep yet, since it was not yet nine o’clock. There was nothing she could do. It was as though she had been locked away.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“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.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“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.”
― Colm Tóibín

“She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.”
― Colm Toibin, The Empty Family

“Even though she let these thoughts run as fast as they would, she still stopped when her mind moved towards real fear or dread or, worse, towards the thought that she was going to lose this world for ever, that she would never have an ordinary day again in this ordinary place, that the rest of her life would be a struggle with the unfamiliar.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“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.”
― Colm Tóibín, Nora Webster

“None of them could help her. She had lost all of them. They would not find out about this; she would not put it into a letter. And because of this she understood that they would never know her now. Maybe, she thought, they had never known her, any of them, because if they had, then they would have had to realize what this would be like for her.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“I remember too much; I am like the air on a calm day as it holds itself still, letting nothing escape.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“I do not know why it matters that I should tell the truth to myself at night, why it should matter that the truth should be spoken at least once in the world. Because the world is a place of silence, the sky at night when the birds have gone is a vast silent place. Words will make the slightest difference to the sky at night. They will not brighten it or make it less strange. And the day too has its own deep indifference to anything that is said.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“It is terrible to be an unprotected being.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her. What once was life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“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.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“She would learn how to spend these hours. In the peace of these winter evenings, she would work out how she was going to live.”
― Colm Tóibín, Nora Webster

“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.”
― Colm Tóibín

“I like it that they [disciples] feed me and pay for my clothes and protect me. And in return I will do for them what I can, but no more than that. Just as I cannot breathe the breath of another or help the heart of someone else to beat or their bones not to weaken or their flesh not to shrivel, I cannot say more than I can say. And I know how deeply this disturbs them, and it would make me smile, this earnest need for foolish anecdote or sharp simple patterns in the story of what happened to us all, except that I have forgotten how to smile.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“If water can be changed into wine and the dead can be brought back, then I want time pushed back.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“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.”
― Colm Tóibín

“Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices. They mean nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea. They meant less than the marl and the mud and the dry clay of the cliff that were eaten away by the weather, washed away by the sea. It was not just that they would fade: they hardly existed, they did not matter, they would have no impact on this cold dawn, this deserted remote seascape where the water shone in the early light and shocked her with its sullen beauty. It might have been better, she felt, if there had never been people, if this turning of the world, and the glistening sea, and the morning breeze happened without witnesses, without anyone feeling, or remembering, or dying, or trying to love. She stood at the edge of the cliff until the sun came out from behind the black rainclouds,”
― Colm Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship