Quotes from Niall Williams

Forse ogni poeta è condannato all'insoddisfazione. Dev'essere per colpa della luce che li abbaglia

We came up the hill by the fort, stopped at Matt Cleary's, a contrarian. We left the bicycles by the cow cabins. Matt was out in the haggard and came warily, followed by a little inquisitorial committee of hens.

like all male lovers he had quickly built a rose-coloured version that matched his own hope:

the overwhelming sheer aloneness that hangs in the air in rural Ireland is a potent force. It is at once the greatest positive and negative thing about the countryside. For with it comes not only the peacefulness of life here, the undeniable sense of the spiritual, but also the consequent darker aspects of hopelessness and madness.

He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started it without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. Story was the stuff of life, and to realise you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and suffering and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way.

building a tower of description that was in constant danger of toppling over as more and more clauses were thrown on to it, adjectives and adverbs, bounteous, haltingly, found in pockets and pitched on, similes not spared, prepositions dangling and otherwise, metaphors

They had no children. They spent money on the house, and for five years it went through an elaborate series of new looks each one more ambitiously designed than the next, until to scratch the wall in the bathroom was to reveal a rainbow of pastel shades in which could be read my mother's hopeless biannual efforts to sustain her domestic dream.

My father's hand found the door locked. His calls to my mother went unanswered. He beat with his fists and called out her name, again and again, tears burning from his eyes. By the time I had come in the front door, the cake in my arms, he had broken his way in and discovered she was dead.

carne-not-vale but salve, a loud hello and hallelujah both, a dizzying lostness in which was found another version of yourself, one that was tasting smoke and chocolate and make-up, none of which you liked but did now, even as your wrists were singing, the egg on your forehead breaking, and your eyes agape from the out-of-this-world experience of your face eaten by a swan.

Below this shelf are these big dinner plates on display, they're wedding china that came from Aunts Penelope and Daphne some years before Lester and Chester. They were very china-giving aunts, which was of course secret warfare because the more they gave the more you had to find some place to display the stuff. We had china in boxes in the cabins that we couldn't sell because it had to be taken out when The Aunts arrived.

She'd rather break her own heart than have it broken.

There is no Heaven. How can there be? Think about it. For starters, if all the good people there have ever been are already there, how big would it have to be? Second, what a social nightmare. It'd be like all the good characters in all the books in the ultimate library of the world left their books, stepped out of their stories and were told just mingle.

But, with a bewildering contrariness, the intimacies of the Mars were between us and too vertiginous to cross.

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.

dangles of rosary beads moving through fingers like some circular riverworks of soul. The Men's Aisle didn't fill until

slept the thin sleep of those familiar with the clockless continuum of human woe

It could be hail and gale outside. Mrs Quinty opened the windows. Then she took out these little wipes and wiped down the surface of the desk. That lady brought with her her own environment.

Passing on. It's not even grammatical. It just hangs there, vague and inconclusive. It's like saying he went up to. Passed on to where, exactly?

reasons too deep to be fished.

Compelling and poetic, Four Letters of Love spirits the reader away to a magical, mist-clad coastline, inhabited by a passionate people, and unfurls like some epic poem which has been handed down in song, generation to generation. Half fable, half tragic realism, its musical rhythm is unforgettable

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.

He had no intention of writing. He loved reading, that was all. And he read books that he thought so far beyond anything that he himself could dream of achieving that any thought of writing instantly evaporated into the certainty of failure.

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.

It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.