Quotes from Niall Williams

When I was twelve years old god spoke to my father for the first time.

When you're different you've got two choices. You can stand out or you step back.

Somehow the river is louder when you cover your ears.

you stood in the revelation of so many stars you could not credit the wonder and felt smaller in body as your soul felt enormous.

My hope has a small h.

You could find these people then, remarkable originals, men and women who thrived on remoteness and kept alive the individuality of human genius.

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.

I thought it best to just snap his heart across. Otherwise there are all these messy fragments.

Goodness provokes bitchiness. It's mathematical. It's somewhere in the human genes. Any number of lovely people are married to horrible ones.

Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this Ah, because there's something in them that's brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here's the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling why am I so ordinary?, you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn't realised or you'd forgotten human beings could shine so.

The parts of our lives when we write them down seem to belong in different books, by different writers even. What all these bits and pieces make up I don't know. There is no plot. Perhaps meaning is something we invent afterward, putting it all together, like imagined God.

The question is too big for him. I will see this often in the years to come, the way he could suddenly pause on a phrase or even just a word, as if in it were a doorway and his mind would enter and leave us momentarily. Back then we thought it was what all fathers did. We thought that fatherhood was this immense weight like a great overcoat and there were all manner of things your father had to be thinking of all the time just to keep the overcoat from crushing him.

Jimmy Mack said she had Gone-into-Teaching because it was the only place where she could rule without reprisal; where she could give free rein to the awesome dimension of her need to crush things. Mr. Conheedy it seemed had enjoyed this for the first three months of their marriage, but then had run off, Nan said to try and find a female Mrs. Conheedy next time around.

And in just this way the days after my father's death became weeks became months in the familiar ceaseless cruelty of time, carrying us ever forward even when we sit still. Time does not pass, pain grows." (p.223)

It was a small thing, and an enormous one. In

When he was small he held the label inside his pillowcase when he slept. Only I know that. I was not a sleeper. His hand in sleep searched to find it. He would take the label between thumb and forefinger and just move it slightly against itself, over and back, as if the smallest friction was sufficient, as if with that he knew he was still in the world.

silently gazing beneath the stars. And in that fall of light from heaven to earth perhaps all our stories were told, all actions of the living and dead explained, and all time past present and future there revealed.

Dad was always awkward in scenes like this. He was a Swain and Swains are not for joining in. They're not part of the General Population somehow. There's

feel the sun striking down and know something of the peace of that pause, the dawning that opens in a person, which is not yet at the point of understanding, not yet anything solid or sure as a thought, but happens in a way that you may not realise until years later and miles away when it comes to you that just then, just there, you were brushed with nothing less than eternity, catching a sense of a place that has been before you and will be after you, and both were contained in that moment.

The rosary was said in most houses then, but in few midnight gardens. The version that night was murmured and swift. By native decree, and the proven truth that no nation spoke faster, punctuation in prayer had been long ago dispensed with, breathless delivery was acceptable to the Lord who could pause, parse and separate the string of prayers in His own time.

History had turned violent again and Mr MacGhiolla with a special gleam in his eyes had departed for the North. He left my father books with trapped strands of red hair and a faint sulphuric whiff of nationalism trapped within the pages.

you can turn a corner and find your life waiting there for you, and that if you walked past it, it would come after and keep tapping you on the shoulder.

Grandmother's English heritage meant that she had that Empire voice, that come-out-of-your-grass-huts-and-give-us-your-treasures-for-our-museums kind of voice. The woman could boom. It was seriously terrifying. Even years later when my father imitated her and she seemed part Margaret Thatcher and part horse Aeney and I were still frightened.

all of them would be gone but be like remembered music or the amassed richness of a lived life.