Quotes from Joy Williams

To be human was to be homeless, furthest removed from the blessing of God.

A novel wants to befriend you, a short story almost never.

You don't get older during the time spent in church, he told us. He pushed a shopping cart with a few rags and a bottle of Windex in it. We gave him a dollar.

Every living thing suffers transfiguration. Yes, until the creation of Eve, Adam had fondled beasts.

What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.

One of the great secrets of life is learning to live without being happy.

They don't use the word used anymore. With cars it's preowned. With books, preread. With clothes what would you say, preoccupied?

You needed to know only one person in your life, and that was yourself. You had to find that person and make friends with it if you could and hope it wouldn't turn on you before you had a chance to familiarize yourself with its habits and tear you limb from limb.

Jane kneels and kisses her soiled son. David does not look at her. It is as though, however, he is dreaming of looking at her.

So many times in a single day we glimpse a view beyond the apparent. Write those moments down. They might not speak to you at first. But eventually they might. Everybody writes too long and too much anyway, sacrificing significance for story. Truth be told, we all want to be poets.

That's nice, isn't it?" Edith said. "That little kid is so trusting it's kind of holy, but if his trust were misplaced it would really be holy.

Plants have lived in the Now for a long time but they still have to have some things explained to them.

hThere was something shameful about surviving sorrow. You were corrupted. She was corrupted. She was no good anymore. She was inauthentic, apocryphal. She wanted to be a seeker and to travel further and further. But after sorrow, such traveling is not a climbing but a sinking to a depth leached of light at which you are unfit to endure. And yet you endure there.

To be anywhere other than the now is to paint eyeballs on chaos.

Miriam wrung her hands, and said, "Your child dreads to become alive and real because he fears that in doing so, the risk of annihilation is immediately potentiated.

Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that blackly reminded the lonely of the darkness.

People go, you know. It's only you that remains. That's the way it will be. That's certain at least. It takes years to learn to be still.

Have a nice remainder of the rest of your life.

Pearl would smile helplessly back with the sickening feeling that she was collaborating with God. Not the God of her mother's faulty and romantic vision, but the true one. A God of barbaric and unholy appearance, with a mind uncomplimentary to human consciousness.

Of course it was all just whistling in the dark, but sometimes she would conclude by saying that despite their clumsy grief and all the lost and puzzling years that still lay ahead of them, the earth was no less beautiful.

Love had different beginnings but always the same end. Someone was going to get hurt.

Freedom was an illusion even when one's instincts were good.

Love comes and goes, pitching its mansion. And on the circular track of days, it appears that Dread is gaining on Devotion every second.

The Lord was in line at the pharmacy counter waiting to get His shingles shot.