Life & Wisdom Quote by John McGahern

Mortality is doing the editing here. McGahern’s line has the quiet audacity of a late-career writer admitting that plot - the neat, résumé-ready summary of what happened - starts to look like a minor instrument once you feel time tightening. The “realisation” isn’t melodrama; it’s a pressure change. When you know you’re finite, you stop writing as if you’re filing a report and start writing as if you’re trying to preserve a way of seeing.

“The way of saying” is McGahern’s real subject: cadence, restraint, the moral weight of choosing one word over another. In his Irish context - steeped in talk, silence, Church authority, and the politics of who gets to speak plainly - language isn’t decoration. It’s permission, defiance, intimacy. The subtext is a craft credo: stories are interchangeable; sentences are not. Anyone can recount an incident. Few can make a line carry the aftertaste of a room, a family, a country’s habits of feeling.

There’s also a hard-earned humility tucked inside it. If life won’t give you endless time, art can’t pretend to offer total comprehension, either. So McGahern turns from the grand explanatory arc to the exact note. Meaning is smuggled through tone, through what’s withheld, through the rhythm that makes an ordinary moment feel irrevocably lived. Plot resolves; language endures.