Quotes from Joy Williams

Poppa was going to bury them when he was up to it, but he was becoming more and more preoccupied with the news, at all hours of the day. His handyman abilities were slowly atrophying. Overwhelming input and feeble output, he'd say, that's my problem now.

It was just before dusk. Then there would be dusk. Then night. Day again. The little deaths – las muertes chiquitas - then the big one. It was all practise.

Perhaps understanding was more important than Love, and perhaps the highest form of understanding was the understanding of oneself, one's motives and desires and capabilities. Constance thought about this but the idea didn't appeal to her much. She dismissed it.

Though it's quite apparent that the environment has been grossly polluted and the natural world abused and defiled, you seem to prefer to continue pondering effects rather than preventing causes.

The girl is twenty-five. It has not been very long since her divorce but she cannot remember the man who used to be her husband. He was probably nice. She will tell the child this, at any rate.

If you really want me to give up my car or my air conditioner, you'd better prove to me first that the earth would otherwise be uninhabitable, Dr. Lave says. Me is you, I presume, whereas you refers to them. You as in me—that is, me, me, me—certainly strike a hard bargain. Uninhabitable the world has to get before you rein in your requirements

doing this since 1976! And what they've found so far in these preliminary studies is that pollutants are really destructive. The lakes get gross. Life in them ceases. It took about eight years to make this happen in one of them, everything carefully measured and controlled all the while. Now the scientists are slowly reversing the process. But it will take hundreds of years for the lakes to recover. They think.

You don't seem to associate them with the problems of population increase. They're just babies! And you've come to believe in them again. They're a lot more tangible than the afterlife, which, of course, you haven't believed in in ages. At least not for yourself. The afterlife now belongs to plastics and poisons

You haven't entered a new age at all but one of upscale nihilism, deluxe nihilism.

At the point in his lecture where he was saying that the representative element in a work of art is always irrelevant, that for one to appreciate a work of art one must bring to it nothing from life, no knowledge of life's affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions and desires, he was seized by the most stupefying boredom and he had to leave the stage.

She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.

There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance.

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.

Words at night were feral things.

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.

We are saved not because we are worthy. We are saved because we are loved.

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

Memory is the resurrection. The dead move among us the living in our memory and that is the resurrection.

Clouds aren't as pretty as they used to be. That's a known fact.

Alice heard a woman say, 'Before I start writing I feel affectionate, interested, and frustrated. In that order. Afterwards I feel relieved, disgusted, and confused. Sometimes I don't think it's worth it.

Pearl suspected God didn't love human beings much. She suspected that what He loved most was Nothingness.

Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face.

The writer doesn't write for the reader. He doesn't write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.

Perhaps the human race had yet to be born. Perhaps it was all a deception by the government. It hadn't happened yet. This life was nothing but the womb.