Quotes from Niall Williams

Where are you, Aeney? You slip away from me as you always did. Where are you?

at that moment I understood that this in miniature was the world, a connective of human feeling, for the most part by far pulsing with the dream of the betterment of the other, and in this was an invisible current that, despite faults and breakdowns, was all the time being restored and switched back on and was running not because of past or future times but because, all times since beginning and to the end, the signal was still on, still pulsing, and still trying to love.

Transcendence is the business of poets. That's what they're for. They're not like you and me. They have that extra bit that's always ready for take-off. Poets understand why God didn't give us wings: he wanted entertainment. He wanted us to aspire, to ascend. He wanted poetry. My

My father revisited Moby a lot. Maybe it's because there's no other novel in the whole world that better captures the Impossible Standard.

Let's not see each other until we are in the next place.

You knew, you knew the Commandments, had learned them out of the missal-thin pages of the green Catechism, where, in a genius move of utter simplicity God had set the high bar for Christianity by saying Love your neighbor like yourself, and you read that and looked over at your neighbor, Patrick Plunkett picking his nose and pressing the pickings on the underside of your desk, and by virtue of nothing more than carnal reality that bar got that much higher.

his belief in what the poet called the holiness of the heart's affections

So compelling is the evidence of our own eyes and ears, so swift is your mind to assemble your own version of the story, that one of the hardest things in this world is to understand there's another way of seeing things.

little inquisitorial committee of hens.

Ho letto tutti gli autori usuali, Austen, Brontë, Eliot, Hardy, ma Dickens è come un paese meraviglioso dove le persone sono più brillanti e vivaci, più comiche e più tragiche e in loro compagnia senti che il mondo è più ricco e fantastico di quanto immaginavi

Non ricordo in che libro fosse. Ma ora è in questo

Fortunately, at that time, Ireland wasn't in the world. So we weren't in the World War. Old Roundrims came up with that. Brilliant, really. World War II was toirmiscthe, he said, which people had to look up but basically turned out to be verboten in Irish. Twitter went crazy, saying it was shameful and backward, but back then twitter was only spoken by birds.

La mente umana, anche una mente minuscola, aborrisce l'ambiguità

Se sei diverso hai due possibilità: o ti distingui o cerchi di passare inosservato

that elsewhere from which all music takes its origins.

Partire e fermarsi sono le due cose più difficili

Imparavamo la meravigliosa verità che essere adorati rende adorabili

Writing is a sickness only cured by writing.

Umoristica (medica): "Gli specialisti sono mistici e sapienti come i Magi, ma funzionano al contrario: sei tu che devi andare da loro

You can't go encouraging the Vincent Cunninghams of the world because the truth is boys can fall deeper in love than girls, they're a lot bigger and heavier and they can fall much further and harder and when they hit the ground of reality there's just this terrible splosh that some other woman is going to have to come along and try to put back into the bottle.

Umoristica (materna): "Aveva la dote più apprezzata dei neonati, ovvero l'Arte Di Mettere Su Peso

All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will soon improve and things will go well for us, because it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever, and from this it follows that since the

Umoristica (sessista): "Alcuni membri della Commissione avrebbero preferito che le donne non fossero ammesse in Irlanda, ma ci voleva pure qualcuno che stirasse

Noi siamo la nostra storia, la raccontiamo per rimanere vivi o mantenere in vita quelli che raccontiamo