Quotes from Niall Williams

I think maybe I had a first sense then of the power of story, and realised that time had done what Time sometimes does to hardship, turn it into fairy tale.

Fionn learned that to make a poet you need: Fire of Song, Light of Knowledge and the Art of Recitation

and keep tapping you on the shoulder.

It's hard to live on hope. Living on hope you get thin and tired. Hope pares you away from the inside. You're all the time living in the future. In the future things will be better, you hope, and you'll feel better and you won't wake up feeling like someone has been taking the life of you drip by drip while you slept.

that easy Irishry that shrugs its shoulders at the practical world and goes on down the road in the cool of an evening whistling a tune.

can see the way she's hoping so hard that this might be the time, this might be Help Coming. She's hoping and trying not to hope at the same time. And that's the saddest thing. Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it's definitely a Thing with Claws.

how to be a fully alive human being

In the fields, cattle, memories dissolved by so many liquid mornings, noons and nights, had forgotten they dreamed of April grass and, by a clemency reserved for those who live placid in a perpetual now, standing in a green sweetness forgot the cold muck-grazing of February. On

but if there's one sure way not to forget something it's to say Forget That.

When your spirit is uneasy, stillness can be a kind of suffering. And when you're young, the unlived life in you, all that future, urgent and unreachable, can be unbearable.

the more the musicians played the more it struck me that Irish music was a language of its own, accommodating expression of ecstasy and rapture and lightness and fun as well as sadness and darkness and loss, and that in its rhythms and repetitions was the trace history of humanity thereabouts, going round and round.

Ganga told me Naughton's grandfather had operated a poteen still out of the Fairy Fort there. By way of both respect and payment of rent he always let the fairies have the first glass.

The basis of the Impossible Standard is that no matter how hard you try you can't ever be good enough. The Standard raises as you do. Ruth Swain in "History of the Rain

I lay blinking in the chastened light as the world condensed to two certainties, one, the jelly of my brain had swollen too large for my skull, the other, I would never again drink alcohol.

Margaret Gore knew what love was.

The nobleman fell to his knees. 'Sir, come down to my son ere he die.' His old face. His love for his son. None of us spoke, the old man kneeling so. I watched your eyes. The pity that pooled, this love of the father. 'Go thy way; thy son lives,' you said. And he raised his face to you, and we could see that he believed.

The tops of pages are river-and-rain-warped, the whole book buckled a bit from travel, age and pockets, but it's a book that feels companionable somehow, if you know what I mean. In it there are many pages with lines underscored, or in some cases with just ascending wing-like Nike tick-marks next to a paragraph.

It's hard to live on hope. Living on hope you get thin and tired. Hope pares you away from the inside. You're all the time living in the future. In the future things will be better, you hope, and you'll feel better and you won't wake up feeling like someone has been taking the life out of you drip by drip while you slept.

To have hope you have to have faith. That's the crazy bit. You have to believe things could get better. You have no idea how exactly, but somehow. It's a blindness thing, faith.

This is my father's story. I am writing it to find him. But to get where you're going, you have to first go backwards. That's directions in Ireland, it's also T.S. Eliot.

It was where once, in town, I watched my grandfather come out of Brews, take a big copper penny from his pocket, place it on the path, and walk away. When I asked him why, he smiled an iceberg smile whose depths were unknown, and said, 'The man, woman or child that finds that will think it's their lucky day.' He delivered a large wink, added: 'And it will be.

Some things do not bear telling. I think my father knew this. I think he knew how words can sometimes flatten the deepest emotions or pin them like wild butterflies stunned out of magnificent flight, flimsiest souvenirs of what moved and coloured air like silk. Better to imagine it.

all plots turn out right in the end.

Irish people will read anything as long as it's about them. That's what I think. We are our own greatest subject and though we've gone and looked elsewhere about the world we have found that there are just no people, no subject as fascinating as We Ourselves.