John McGahern > Quotes

“…only then did I wake out of the book.”
― John McGahern

“..the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.”
― John McGahern, All Will Be Well: A Memoir

“They'd listen silenty, with grave faces: but once they'd turn to each other they'd smile cruelly. He couldn't have it both ways. He'd put himself outside and outside they'd make him stay. Neither brutality nor complaining could force a way in.”
― John McGahern, The Dark

“...with a rush of feeling he felt that this must be happiness. As soon as the thought came to him, he fought it back, blaming the whiskey. The very idea was as dangerous as presumptive speech: happiness could not be sought or worried into being, or even fully grasped; it should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all.”
― John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun

“I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world.”
― John McGahern

“If it's well written, even an obscene book cannot be immoral.

John McGahern, Galway, October 6th 2003. "Acclaimed as the most important Irish novellist since James Joyce.”
― John McGahern

“As looking down from great heights brings the urge to fall and end the terror of falling, so his very watching put pressure on them to make a slip as they dried and stacked the plates and cups.”
― John McGahern, Amongst Women

“His abhorrence and fear of alcohol did not extend to his power as host. He kept a huge cupboard of drinks in the station house and loved to serve large measures to visiting relatives--especially those he disliked--about which there was a definite element of spreading bait for garden snails.”
― John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun

“Across her face there seemed to pass many feelings and reflections: it was as if she ached to touch and gather in and make whole those scattered years of change. But how can time be gathered in and kissed? There is only flesh.”
― John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun

“About this time, whether he felt there wasn't sufficient drama in his life or that he was determined not to be outdone by Miss McCabe, he decided that he was dying.”
― John McGahern, All Will Be Well: A Memoir

“For the girls the regular comings and goings restored their superior sense of self, a superiority they had received intact from Moran and which was little acknowledged by the wide world in which they had to work and live. That unexplained notion of superiority was often badly shaken and in need of restoration by the time they came home.”
― John McGahern, Amongst Women

“To leave the everpresent tension of Great Meadow was like shedding stiff, formal clothes or kicking off pinching shoes.”
― John McGahern, Amongst Women

“Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary (and potentially subversive) alone with a book the whole razzmatazz of prizes, banquets, television spectaculars, bestseller lists, even literature courses, editors and authors, are all worthless. Unless a book finds lovers among those solitary readers, it will not live . . . or live for long.”
― John McGahern, Love of the World: Essays

“…But all life turns away from its own eventual hopelessness, leaving insomnia and its night to lovers and the dying.”
― John McGahern, Getting Through

“A priest could have no anguish, he’d given up happiness, his fixed life moving in the calm of certainty into its end, cursed by no earthly love or longing, all had been chosen years before.”
― John McGahern, The Dark

“It was some time before Stoner recognized the source of his attraction to Hollis Lomax. In Lomax’s arrogance, his fluency, and his cheerful bitterness, Stoner saw, distorted but recognizable, an image of his friend David Masters. He wished to talk to him as he had talked to Dave; but he could not, even after he admitted his wish to himself. The awkwardness of his youth had not left him, but the eagerness and straightforwardness that might have made the friendship possible had. He knew what he wished was impossible, and the knowledge saddened him.”
― John McGahern, Stoner

“When a long abuse of power is corrected, it is generally replaced by an opposite violence. In the new dispensation all that was good in what went before is tarred indiscriminately with the bad.”
― John McGahern

“The days were quiet. They did not feel particularly quiet or happy but through them ran the sense, like an underground river, that there would come a time when these days would be looked back on as happiness, all that life could give of contentment and peace.”
― John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun

“People are funny. They look down from all sorts of heights and then if the looking down has no effect they get unsure.”
― john mcgahern

“It [love] was a passion neither of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance.”
― John McGahern

“Sometimes Edith came into the room and sat on the bed beside him and they talked. They talked of trivial things—of people they knew casually, of a new building going up on the campus, of an old one torn down; but what they said did not seem to matter. A new tranquillity had come between them. It was a quietness that was like the beginning of love; and almost without thinking, Stoner knew why it had come. They had forgiven themselves for the harm they had done each other, and they were rapt in a regard of what their life together might have been.”
― John McGahern, Stoner

“Sensing her hard separateness in their separate footsteps as they walked towards her home in the sleeping suburbs, he began to feel that by now there should be more between them than this sensual ease. Till now, for him, the luxury of this ease had been perfect. This uncomplicated pleasure seemed the very fullness of life, seemed all that life could yearn towards, and yet it could not go one forever. There comes a point in all living things when they must change or die, and maybe they had passed that point already without noticing, and that already he had lost her, when he was longing to draw closer.”
― John McGahern, Getting Through

“As men obsessed with the idea that all knowledge lies within a woman's body, but having entered it to find themselves as ignorant as before, they are driven towards all women again and again: in childish hope that somehow the next time they will find the treasure, and then the equally childish desire for revenge since it cannot be found, that knife in the unfathomable entrails; and they grow full of hatred.”
― John McGahern

“There’s a very interesting thing that Scott Fitzgerald said [about creating characters], ‘If you start with a person, you end up with a type, but if you start with a type you wind up with nothing.’ You set out to discover something in your writing and it is through the attempt to discover that you reflect. If you have your mind made up about something you’ll reflect nothing.”
― John McGahern

“All the things we say. And how little of all the words even touch any reality. Or perhaps they all do if we knew it,”
― John McGahern, The Dark

“Time should have stopped with the clocks but instead it moved in a glazed dream of tiredness without their ticking insistence.”
― John McGahern, Amongst Women

“You were a beautiful child,” he heard himself saying, and for a moment he did not know to whom he spoke. Light swam before his eyes, found shape, and became the face of his daughter, lined and somber and worn with care.”
― John McGahern, Stoner

“I suppose that's how you get old. You find yourself not doing a whole lot of things you once did without thought.”
― John McGahern, Amongst Women

“There are no things more cruel than truths about ourselves spoken to us by another that are perceived to be at least half true. Left unsaid and hidden we feel they can be changed or eradicated, in time.”
― John McGahern, The Collected Stories of John McGahern

“to sit in the comforting darkness and reek of Jeyes Fluid to weep and grope their way in hatred and self-pity back to some sort of calm.”
― John McGahern, The Dark