Quotes from William Trevor

Her tranquillity is their astonishment. For that they come, to be amazed again that such peace is there: all they have heard, and still hear now, does not record it. Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel.

It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more.

It was always the same: everywhere there were the hard-hearted who pretended an interest, who began a conversation and then, their cadging over, walked away.

Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

He traveled in order to come home.

I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.

I cried myself, thinking of the grass growing on her tennis court, and the cruelty that was natural.

He'll not confess he knew, in the end, that the drama of death does not come into it – that some pain's too dull to be worthy of a romantic shroud. Courage could have brushed glamour over what little there was, but courage is ridiculous when the other person doesn't want to know.

He was new to London in those days, and he had not liked it. He had not cared for the intensity of the traffic, or the underground trains that were full of a human smell and of people who lit up tipped cigarettes and pushed with their elbows.

Would he ever, he wondered, escape from people who banged on the doors he locked to demand his egress?

small bathroom she drew on her nightdress again in order

A person's life isn't orderly (...); it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present's hardly there; the future doesn't exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

Then he undressed and brushed his teeth. He examined his face in the slightly tarnished looking-glass above the wash-basin. He was fifty-seven, but according to this reflection older. His face would seem younger if he put on a bit of weight; chubbiness could be made to cover a multitude of sins. But he didn't want that; he liked being thought of as beyond things.

When Mr Bird had written his will and had read it over he became aware that he was laughing. He heard the sound for some time, a minute or a minute and a quarter, and then he recognized its source and wondered why he was laughing like that, such a quiet, slurping sound, like the lapping of water.

Concealed from the public eye, snug within his coffin, Mr Bird looked as he had looked in life. Despite his size and the flowing bulk of his flesh, he had borne always, since a child, the grey pallor of death; and he had a way of seeming as still as a statue.

Miss Clerricot blushes most charmingly and raises a hand to cover a portion of her countenance. It is a shame, this ill-feeling that exists between Miss Clerricot and her face.

Major Eele observed Studdy clumsily thinking. He saw an opportunity to create a pleasant mischief and did so immediately.

She thought of death and of her own in particular: the death of her body and the death of her face.

Studdy was thinking that the creature was an animal; he was saying to himself that it was surely in error that she had become a member of the human race.

Mr Apse was sixty-three now and Miss Bell was forty-five. Mrs Pope was fifty-nine, Tindall forty-three. Plunkett, reckoned in the village to be about fifty, was in fact precisely that.

Morrissey was singularly small, a man in his mid-thirties who had once been compared to a ferret. He had a thin trap of a mouth and greased black hair that he perpetually attended, directing it back from his forehead with a clogged comb. He was dressed now, as invariably he was, in flannel trousers and the jacket of a blue striped suit over a blue pullover, and a shirt that was buttoned to the neck but did not have a tie in its collar.

I turned away from a bearded face. I put Elsie Timson's holy book down a lavatory. At St Monica's School for Girls I sat in innocence, drinking cocoa with Miss Tample until Miss Tample became a monster. My father ran away, my mother was disgraceful. God is in this kitchen,' cried Mrs Eckdorf. 'God is revealing Himself through that sleeping woman.

All that could not be taken from him. And it didn't matter if, overnight, the colour had worn off the kitchen knobs. It didn't matter if the china light-shade in the kitchen had a crack he hadn't heard about before. What mattered was damage done to something as fragile as a dream.

Always at the same time, at half past four, he visited the woman who once had been a stranger to him, a woman who in her madness confused all the facts of living, who saw things as they were not and people as they were not, who turned everything upside down and inside out.