Quotes from Niall Williams

Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it's definitely a Thing with Claws.

There are only three great puzzles in the world, the puzzle of love, the puzzle of death, and, between each of these and part of both of them, the puzzle of God. God is the greatest puzzle of all.

When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds

Neither did she realise yet that grief is a kind of glue, too, that the essence of humanity is this empathy, and that we fall together in that moment of tenderest perception when we see and feel each other's wounds and know another's sorrow like a brother of our own.

Neighbours, as Jesus knew, can be a not insignificant challenge to anyone's Christianity.

Women carry on. They endure the way old ships do, breasting into outrageous waters, ache and creak, hull holed and decks awash, yet find anchorage in the ordinary, in tables to be wiped down, pots to scrub, and endless ashes to be put out.

All writers are waiting for replies. That's what I've learned. Maybe all human beings are

Because there were fewer sources of where to find out anything, there was more listening.

There's a book inside you. There's a library inside me.

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 long and try to put back into the bottle.

Each family functions in their own way, by rules reinvented daily. The strangeness of each of us is somehow accommodated so that there can be such a thing as family and we can all live for some time at least in the same house. Normal is what you know.

The fact is, I did not appreciate until much later in my own life what subterfuge and sacrifice it took to be independent and undefeated by the pressures of reality.

That was one of the things about him. He walked this line between the comic and the poignant, between the certainly doomed and the hopelessly hopeful. In time I came to think it the common ground of all humanity.

The truth turns into a story when it grows old. We all become stories in the end. So, though the narrative was flawed, the sense was of a life so lived it was epic.

It was where, when darkness fell, it fell absolutely, and when you went outside the wind sometimes drew apart the clouds and 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.

The truth is, like all places in the past, it cannot be found any longer.

Human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become.

After a liquid lunch in Craven's, he had found the margins of the roads badly drawn.