Top 59 Joy Williams Quotes
#2. I believe that God is (and must be) a transcendent presence in any worthy work of art.
Joy Williams
#3. I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don't do anything with it, you lose it.
Joy Williams
#4. 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?
Joy Williams
#5. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.
Joy Williams
#6. Katherine feels that she must have learned something about marriage from being married before that is now working to her benefit. However, she doesn't know quite what it is, or how, actually, it works.
Joy Williams
#7. Shooting felt good. Joy consists in this, after all, the increase of one's power.
Joy Williams
#8. Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.
Joy Williams
#9. He wants to apologize but does not know for what. His life has been devoted to apologetics. It is his profession. He is concerned with both justification and remorse. He has always acted rightly, but nothing has ever come of it.
Joy Williams
#10. That was the problem with public art, it risked great ridicule.
Joy Williams
#11. There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.
Joy Williams
#12. Every living thing suffers transfiguration. Yes, until the creation of Eve, Adam had fondled beasts.
Joy Williams
#13. 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.
Joy Williams
#14. The Lord was in line at the pharmacy counter waiting to get His shingles shot.
Joy Williams
#15. The woman regarded him. Her hands shook. She was really very drunk. "I know everybody in this room," she said. "And you know what I see when I look at them? I don't see anybody I know.
Joy Williams
#16. 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.
Joy Williams
#17. A side benefit of the new and developing technologies is that soon we won't have to feel guilty about the suffering and denigration of the animals because we will have made them up.
Joy Williams
#18. A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough.
Joy Williams
#19. I believe in guilt. There's not enough guilt around these days for my taste.
Joy Williams
#20. 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.
Joy Williams
#21. The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control ... Good writing ... explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head.
Joy Williams
#22. He had dreamed, he had dreamed...it left him.
Joy Williams
#23. One is always enthralled, I think, when a young writer you're just beginning to read and comprehend dies.
Joy Williams
#24. You can do anything you want in this world," J.C. said. "No, you can't," Emily said modestly. "Why, sure you can. And if you don't you'll never know the consequences. You won't be leading any kind of life at all.
Joy Williams
#25. Have a nice remainder of the rest of your life.
Joy Williams
#26. 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.
Joy Williams
#27. We are saved not because we are worthy. We are saved because we are loved.
Joy Williams
#28. 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.
Joy Williams
#29. You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.
Joy Williams
#30. It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.
Joy Williams
#31. As you grow older, you'll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.
Joy Williams
#33. 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.
Joy Williams
#34. Clouds aren't as pretty as they used to be. That's a known fact.
Joy Williams
#35. 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
Joy Williams
#36. Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly.
Joy Williams
#37. 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.
Joy Williams
#38. 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.
Joy Williams
#39. That's what Alice liked about the desert, its constant relentless conflict with itself. The desert was unexpectedly beautiful and horrible at once.
Joy Williams
#40. You should have changed if you wanted to remain yourself but you were afraid to change.
Joy Williams
#41. What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibi lity of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes ...
Joy Williams
#42. Imagination only fails us in the end, when the stories we tell ourselves have to stop.
Joy Williams
#43. Many writers today are wanderers. There is not only an unhousedness in language - how to convey, to say nothing of converge - but an unhousedness of place.
Joy Williams
#44. 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.
Joy Williams
#45. The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it.
Joy Williams
#46. 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.
Joy Williams
#47. Memory is the resurrection. The dead move among us the living in our memory and that is the resurrection.
Joy Williams
#48. Pearl suspected God didn't love human beings much. She suspected that what He loved most was Nothingness.
Joy Williams
#49. But who knows what good might come from the least of us? From the bones of old horses is made the most beautiful Prussian Blue.
Joy Williams
#50. Writers are like eremites or anchorites - natural-born eremites or anchorites - who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place.
Joy Williams
#51. 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.
Joy Williams
#52. 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.
Joy Williams
#53. Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough
Joy Williams
#54. Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead fought continuously and as bitterly as vipers. Their arguments were baroque, stately and, although frequently extraordinary, never enlightening.
Joy Williams
#55. Writers when they're writing live in a spooky, clamorous silence, a state somewhat like the advanced stages of prayer but without prayer's calming benefits.
Joy Williams
#56. A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.
Joy Williams
#57. 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.
Joy Williams
#58. There are certain times where it does not matter If you hear the word yes or the word no in answer to your question, whether you turn left or right, you will reach your destination.
Not many but some.
Joy Williams
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