Quotes from Niall Williams

We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

There are only three great puzzles in the world, the puzzle of love, the puzzle of death, and, between each of these and part of both of them, the puzzle of God. God is the greatest puzzle of all.

I love the feel of a book. I love the touch and smell and sound of the pages. I love the handling . A book is a sensual thing. You sit in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it's, well, enveloping. Weird I am, I know(...)You either get it or you don't.

The skies we slept under were too uncertain for forecasts. They came and went on the moody gusts of the Atlantic, bringing half a dozen weathers in an afternoon and playing all four movements of a wind symphony, allegro, andante, scherzo and adagio on the broken backs of white waves.

Everybody carries a world. But certain people change the air about them.

He loved the strange privacy of being different.

Sometimes a moment pierces so perfectly the shields of our everyday it becomes part of you and enjoys the privilege of being immemorial.

I loved you once is among the saddest lines in humanity.

Love ... was part imagination, its web spun as much in the dark lonely separated evenings of longing as in the shared times together.

We all have to find a story to live by and live inside, or we couldn't endure the certainty of suffering.

Your love is doomed, you must give it everything you've got.

Doing nothing at all is often the very wisest thing ... as the world is a ball and is turning and everything is in fact in motion all the time, doing nothing is not really doing nothing, it's allowing things to mover at their own pace

recited the dictum of Felix Pilkington, 'Life is a comedy, with sad bits.

All of me knelt down. All of me bowed. Inside the chapel of myself, all my candles lit.

Forgive an old man. I say this here because pretty soon you get to a place where you're not sure there'll be a tomorrow, where you think I better say this now, here, because not only is time no longer on your side, you realise that it never was, that things were passing by faster than you could appreciate, and whole marvels, the quickening green of springtime, the shapeless shaped songs of unseen birds, the rising and falling of white waves, were passing without you noticing.

The water is this marvellous blue. It's so blue that once you see it you realise you've never seen blue before. That other thing you were calling blue is some other colour, it's not blue. This, this is blue. It's a blue that comes down from the sky into the water so that when you look in the sea you think sky and when you look at the sky you think sea.

It's a blindness thing, faith.

I'm at an age now when in the early mornings I'm often revisited by all my own mistakes, stupidities and unintended cruelties. They sit around the edge of the bed and look at me and say nothing. But I see them well enough.

For the most part we don't realise how fixed are our judgements of others, how founded they are in first impressions and the smallest evidences we seize on to prove to ourselves that, see, we were right.

When you are born in one century and find yourself walking around in another there's a certain infirmity to your footing. May we all be so lucky to live long enough to see our time turn to fable.

To begin you must be traced into the landscape, your people and your place found. Until they are you are in the wrong story.

Women enjoy watching men work, the same way men enjoy watching women dance. There's otherness and mystery in it.

I am resolved on a career of reparation,' he said. 'And have you? Made amends?' 'It is one of the tragedies of life, that life keeps getting in the way of good intentions. I've made some. I'll make more.

Goodness provokes bitchiness. It's mathematical. It's somewhere in the human genes. Any number of lovely poeple are married to horrible ones. Read Middlemarch (Book 989, George Eliot, Penguin Classics, London) if you don't believe me. There's something in me that just can't let it be. Goodness is a tidy bow you just can't help wanting to pull loose.