Quotes from Niall Williams

I know now that, when you get to a grandfather's age, life takes on the qualities of comedy, with aches.

But I didn't give it more weight than that then, not yet realising you can turn a corner and find your life waiting there for you, and that if you walked past it, it would come after

Men are private. This I have learned. They are whole continents of privacy; you can only go to the borders; you can look in but you cannot enter.

hardship had been part of history for so long it had become a condition of life. There was no expectation things could, or would, be otherwise. You got on with it, and through faith, family and character accommodated as best you could whatever suffering and misfortune was yours.

Nobody who's lived an anyway decent amount of life remembers everything.

And because he hadn't considered attaching blame, because he lived outside of the jurisdiction of all judgement and thought everyone was always doing their best, Ganga put a hand on Christy's shoulder and squeezed.

Listen, here's a human being who has suffered for love. It said Here's a heart aching, and that ache was large enough, urgent and familiar enough, for you all to feel it and by feeling participate in something you yourself were either too timid, closed or unlucky to have known personally, or had known in the long ago of your own innocence over which you had since grown the skin necessary to tolerate the loss and stay living.

I answered Annie's questions about the day outside, about where the electricity crews were, and about myself, which last made dawn on me that it's only when someone asks you about yourself that you exist in the fourth dimension of a story.

I read them all, read them one by one with a kind of constant hunger as if they were apples that fed and made you hungry at the same time.

You can't be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you're beautiful people will be looking at you.

It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul.

Allora, come va il tuo libro, Ruth?' mi ha chiesto Timmy. 'Ruth vuol fare la scrittrice' ha spiegato a Packy. In realtà io non volevo fare la scrittrice, volevo fare la lettrice , aspirazione assai più rara. Ma sai com'è, una cosa tira l'altra.

The basis of the Philosophy of Impossible Standard is that no matter how hard you try you can't ever be good enough. The Standard raises as you do. (…) The Philosophy allows for only one result: we fail the Standard.

Someone has said religion lasted longer in Ireland because we were an imaginative people, and so could most vividly picture the fires of Hell.

when summer was still a word plump and generous and there was actual sunshine and time was impossibly deliciously luxuriously long and the idea of summer stretched out ahead so that now as you entered it you could not imagine it ever ending.

When you've been raised inside a religion, it's not a small thing to step outside it. Even if you no longer believe in it, you can feel its absence. There's a spirit-would to a Sunday. You can patch it, but it's there, whether natural or invented not for me to say.

It is what writers do, imagine and feel the pain of others, sometimes at the expense of feeling their own. Here, then, in these pages is mine, the fear of death, of loss, of unexpressed love. Here is the truth told in a story. And in the telling of it perhaps I have found some way to have courage, to believe.

Her mind was like a bookcase whose shelves had been pulled away, leaving the books pell-mell. All the stories of her life were in there, only confounded one into the other.

Most of the time you don't estimate the good or the bad you do and you have to operate on a small and labouring engine of hope with a blind windscreen and pray you're going in a direction

It is a dolorous fact that a meal, months in the dreaming, weeks in the planning and days in the preparation, is eaten in minutes.

She flashed upon his life with an electric energy, shattering every day's effort at work and leaving a kind of glimmering burning feeling all day and night around the edges of his heart.

In love everything changes, and continues changing all the time. There is no stillness, no stopped clock of the heart in which the moment of happiness holds forever, but only the constant whirring forward motion of desire and need, rising and falling, falling and rising, full of doubts then certainties that moment by moment change and become doubts again.

there's something undoing about the dying light of mid-afternoon.

He had a stillness like white linen folded inside him. But when he heard in the man's tone the desperate beseeching for life, Hadja Bannerje felt the grief rumple him like an illness of the stomach and acknowledged in himself the awfulness of reaching this place at the end of medicine. This, he thought, is beyond the last page of all the books I have studied. This is a place further than prescription.