Quotes from Joy Williams

Your silence is a little black garden. You know everything there by heart.

He had dreamed, he had dreamed...it left him.

Children were quite disturbing really. It was difficult to think about children for long. They were all fickle little nihilists and one was forever being forced to protect oneself from their murderousness.

Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it?

You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.

We can never speak about God rationally as we speak about ordinary things, but that does not mean we should give up thinking about God. We must push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.

She had a dream about a tattoo. This was a pleasant dream. She was walking away and she had the most beautiful tattoo. It covered her shoulders, her back, the back of her legs. It was unspeakably fine.

That's what Alice liked about the desert, its constant relentless conflict with itself. The desert was unexpectedly beautiful and horrible at once.

What is the difference between being not yet born and having lived, being now dead?

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

Silence was a thing entrusted to the animals, the girl thought. Many things that human words have harmed are restored again by the silence of animals

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.