Deirdre Madden > Quotes

“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, Molly Fox's Birthday

“I realize that a certain school of thought
says that who we are is something we construct for ourselves. We build ourselves out of what we think we remember, what we believe to be true about our life; and the possessions we gather around us are supposedly a part of this, that we are, to some extent what we own.”
― Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox's Birthday

“Dark feelings can become a habit. And if they're strong enough, like many strong feelings, they can even be enjoyable.”
― Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox's Birthday

“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, Molly Fox's Birthday

“She began to think of all the people in Belfast who were drinking or drugging themselves into bearable insensibility that night. People would be hitting other people in the face with broken bottles. People were avowing and making love to people for whom they truly cared nothing; other people were screaming hatred at those whom they really did love. People were destroying things, daubing walls with paint and breaking up telephone boxes; joy-riding stolen cars into stone walls. In hospitals and homes, people were watching others dying, hoping and praying that the inevitable would not happen, while other people were planning murder. People elsewhere were trying to commit suicide, fumbling with change for the gas meter or emptying brown plastic bottles of their pills and tablets, which were bitter and dry in the mouth.

And there are, she thought, there must be, people who think as I do.”
― Deirdre Madden, Hidden Symptons

“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, Molly Fox's Birthday

“Rejection only made the attachment stronger. I realized that the impossibility of connection was a driving force behind his desire.”
― Deirdre Madden

“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

“Gently he awoke her, kissed her and stroked her; whispered lies in her ear. She murmured and giggled, half-awake and half-sleeping. He desperately wanted to bury his fearful loneliness in the blackness of the room and in her thin, warm body, but sex solved nothing: there was only panic and the illusion of union; nothing could protect him. Now he hated himself for having visited his morbid thoughts of violent death upon this innocent person beside him, four he had not really been thinking about her, nor even about how much her death would mean to him. He was afraid that his own innocent body might be destroyed violently and quickly and he had been too cowardly even to imagine such a thing, visiting his fear upon Kathy instead. Suddenly, incredibly, he wanted to cry.”
― Deirdre Madden, Hidden Symptons

“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, Molly Fox's Birthday

“Ulster before 1969 had been sick but with hidden symptoms. Streets and streets of houses with bricked up windows and broken fanlights, graffiti on gable walls, soldiers everywhere: Belfast was now like a madman who tears his flesh, put straws in his hair and screams gibberish. Before, it had resembled the infinitely more sinister figure of the articulate man in a dark, neat suit whose conversation charms and entertains; and whose insanity is apparent only when he says calmly, incidentally, that he will club his children to death and eat their entrails with a golden fork because God has told him to do so; and then offers you more tea.”
― Deirdre Madden, Hidden Symptons

“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, Molly Fox's Birthday

“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, Molly Fox's Birthday

“From that day on, Belfast was poisoned for her. She could not conceive of Francis's killer as an indifividual, as a person who might be arrested, tried and punished, but only as a great darkness which was hidden in the hearts of everyone she met. It was as if the act of murder was so dreadful that the person who committed it had forfeited his humanity and had been reduced to the level of pure evil. He had dragged that world down with him: eveyone was guilty.”
― Deirdre Madden, Hidden Symptons

“Touching the scar, quickly, so that no one ever realised that she was doing it, restored a sense of reality, a sense of who she was, in a way that looking at her own reflection could not.”
― Deirdre Madden, One by One in the Darkness

“Nobody could fathom the suffering the troubles had brought people, and all the terrible things that had happened.”
― Deirdre Madden, One by One in the Darkness

“On the outskirts of Antrim there were alright houses where Union Jacks and Ulster flags were hanging out for the Twelfth of July, even though it was only mind June.”
― Deirdre Madden, One by One in the Darkness

“It was strange that someone whose need to worship was so intense could be so dismissive of religion.”
― Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox's Birthday

“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, Molly Fox's Birthday

“I suppose what's similar about being on actor and being a priest is a certain perception of time. Eternity is a priest's business. But we all live in time. And what I'm doing is trying to make people aware of how the two coexist. That's what religion is, keeping that sense of eternity while being in time; trying to live accordingly. The Kingdom of God is here, now. That's what that's all about.”
― Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox's Birthday

“You said that one's first and perhaps only moral responsibility was to be fully human. If you did that, you said, everything else followed on. If you ask me, I suppose I'd say that the only thing you have to do with your life is to live it.”
― Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox's Birthday

“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, Molly Fox's Birthday

“It reminded her of the visceral, uncomprehending emotional closeness that had bound them together over dinners of baked beans and fish fingers eaten at that same table when they were small children.”
― Deirdre Madden, One by One in the Darkness

“Cate stared intently at the land, as if trying to wring some knowledge from it, as if she were seeing it for the first time, although in fact it couldn't have been more familiar to her, the type of landscape against which she still judge all others.”
― Deirdre Madden, One by One in the Darkness

“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

“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, Molly Fox's Birthday

“remember that a person might do bad things ut that that didn't mean they were a bad person”
― Deirdre Madden, One by One in the Darkness

“Cate felt that just by looking at them, people might have guessed that something was wrong, that something had frightened them; and that fear was like a wire which connected them with each other and isolated them from everyone else.”
― Deirdre Madden

“What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul?”
― Deirdre Madden, Hidden Symptons

“Something within her, calm and apparently rational, was thinking that it was impossible for her to continue living without him, that she needed him as she needed air. She did not believe that she could bear the loneliness of being in this world without him.”
― Deirdre Madden, Hidden Symptons