John Banville

"The peaceful person has simply learned to be comfortable with being uncomfortable."

"Technology promises to connect us while secretly driving us further into isolation."

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

"We are all actors on the stage of life, playing parts we barely understand."

"Memory is the treasury of the mind, yet also its prison."

"In the end, we are all mysteries to ourselves."

"The world reveals itself only to those who stop trying to possess it."

"Art is the only democracy we truly possess."

"To love is to surrender to uncertainty."

"The present moment is all we ever truly have."

"Words are the weapons and the wounds of literature."

"Beauty exists in the spaces between things."

"We construct ourselves through the stories we tell."

"Death is the only certainty; everything else is negotiable."

"The soul of prose is precision."

"To understand history is to understand ourselves."

"Solitude is where we meet ourselves most honestly."

"Nature is the first teacher of truth."

"Happiness is often found in what we've stopped seeking."

"The act of creation is an act of faith."

"Silence speaks louder than the thunder of words."

"Every life is an epic poem, though most never know it."

"Forgiveness is the courage to start anew."

"We are shaped by what we refuse as much as what we accept."

"The mind is a labyrinth of its own making."

"Truth wears many faces, none of them entirely honest."

"To write is to reveal and conceal simultaneously."

"Hope is the last invention of the desperate."

"Freedom is the burden we bear willingly."

"Knowledge without compassion is merely data."