Top 49 Niall Williams Quotes

#1. Writing is a sickness only cured by writing.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #6701
#2. It's a blindness thing, faith.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #49549
#3. My father revisited Moby a lot. Maybe it's because there's no other novel in the whole world that better captures the Impossible Standard.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #219738
#4. The basis of the Philosophy of Impossible Standard is that no matter how hard you try you can't ever be good enough. The Standard raises as you do. ( ... ) The Philosophy allows for only one result: we fail the Standard.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #222331
#5. We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #259866
#6. There are only three great puzzles in the world, the puzzle of love, the puzzle of death, and, between each of these and part of both of them, the puzzle of God. God is the greatest puzzle of all.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #263896
#7. Each family functions in their own way, by rules reinvented daily. The strangeness of each of us is somehow accommodated so that there can be such a thing as family and we can all live for some time at least in the same house. Normal is what you know.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #284521
#8. Human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #304533
#9. Some things, most things in my experience, are more vivid when you haven't seen them,

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #369322
#10. There were families everywhere, loose loud chains of them wandering down the streets, in and out of shops, young children with rings of ice-cream round their mouths and saddles of freckles across their noses.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #395492
#11. And in just this way the days after my father's death became weeks became months in the familiar ceaseless cruelty of time, carrying us ever forward even when we sit still. Time does not pass, pain grows. (p.223)

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #434763
#12. Somehow the river is louder when you cover your ears.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #475615
#13. Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it's definitely a Thing with Claws.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #520134
#14. We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #604397
#15. Chapter 19 Where are you, Aeney? You slip away from me as you always did. Where are you?

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #608365
#16. Transcendence is the business of poets. That's what they're for. They're not like you and me. They have that extra bit that's always ready for take-off. Poets understand why God didn't give us wings: he wanted entertainment. He wanted us to aspire, to ascend. He wanted poetry. My

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #619502
#17. Between the emotion and the response falls the shadow, T.S. Eliot said,

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #694469
#18. The truth is boys can fall deeper in love than girls, they're a lot bigger and heavier and they can fall much further and harder and when they hit the ground of reality there's just this terrible splosh that some other woman is going to have to come long and try to put back into the bottle.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #695602
#19. I think maybe I had a first sense then of the power of story, and realised that time had done what Time sometimes does to hardship, turn it into fairy tale.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #726155
#20. You can't be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you're beautiful people will be looking at you.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #727093
#21. When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #753874
#22. When you're different you've got two choices. You can stand out or you step back.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #756789
#23. I read them all, read them one by one with a kind of constant hunger as if they were apples that fed and made you hungry at the same time.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #764446
#24. All writers are waiting for replies. That's what I've learned. Maybe all human beings are

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #846826
#25. But if there's one sure way not to forget something it's to say Forget That.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #914140
#26. The skies we slept under were too uncertain for forecasts. They came and went on the moody gusts of the Atlantic, bringing half a dozen weathers in an afternoon and playing all four movements of a wind symphony, allegro, andante, scherzo and adagio on the broken backs of white waves.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1003722
#27. Dad was always awkward in scenes like this. He was a Swain and Swains are not for joining in. They're not part of the General Population somehow. There's

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1011692
#28. People are odd creations, this is my theme.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1023621
#29. The parts of our lives when we write them down seem to belong in different books, by different writers even. What all these bits and pieces make up I don't know. There is no plot. Perhaps meaning is something we invent afterward, putting it all together, like imagined God.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1033547
#30. Doing nothing at all is often the very wisest thing ... as the world is a ball and is turning and everything is in fact in motion all the time, doing nothing is not really doing nothing, it's allowing things to mover at their own pace

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1038220
#31. Was already different because I was a twin. Funny how you can say that: I am a twin. Not I am one of twins, but I actually am A Twin. Like there's two of me all the time, this other one right here beside me whether you can see him or not. Or as if you're saying, I'm a Half.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1118080
#32. My hope has a small h.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1124896
#33. The world is more outlandish than some people's imaginations.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1172319
#34. There's a book inside you. There's a library inside me.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1209542
#35. He walked out with the inner lightness of an author who has delivered. He wore a green tweed with flap pockets, cast into the river at Rosnaree, began his heart attack, and entered the Afterlife just after his fly was taken.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1340391
#36. Irish people will read anything as long as it's about them. That's what I think. We are our own greatest subject and though we've gone and looked elsewhere about the world we have found that there are just no people, no subject as fascinating as We Ourselves.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1342154
#37. Chapter 12 Your blood is a river. Chapter

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1354960
#38. A truly extraordinary work: vivid, passionate and utterly compelling. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is raw as a wound. It opens a world that is strange, brutal and poetic at once and ultimately achieves the kind of spirit-healing few novels do

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1357561
#39. Is that true, Ruth?' Mrs Quinty asked, eyes enormous and brows lifted, missing altogether the point of stories.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1411179
#40. He loved the strange privacy of being different.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1432258
#41. He had no intention of writing. He loved reading, that was all. And he read books that he thought so far beyond anything that he himself could dream of achieving that any thought of writing instantly evaporated into the certainty of failure.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1436725
#42. Women carry on. They endure the way old ships do, breasting into outrageous waters, ache and creak, hull holed and decks awash, yet find anchorage in the ordinary, in tables to be wiped down, pots to scrub, and endless ashes to be put out.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1469435
#43. Neither did she realise yet that grief is a kind of glue, too, that the essence of humanity is this empathy, and that we fall together in that moment of tenderest perception when we see and feel each other's wounds and know another's sorrow like a brother of our own.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1668121
#44. was open the windows. It could be

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1738026
#45. Men are private. This I have learned. They are whole continents of privacy; you can only go to the borders; you can look in but you cannot enter.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1764072
#46. I love the feel of a book. I love the touch and smell and sound of the pages. I love the handling. A book is a sensual thing. You sit in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it's, well, enveloping. Weird I am, I know(...)You either get it or you don't.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1766037
#47. The basis of the Impossible Standard is that no matter how hard you try you can't ever be good enough. The Standard raises as you do.
Ruth Swain in History of the Rain

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1822784
#48. She flashed upon his life with an electric energy, shattering every day's effort at work and leaving a kind of glimmering burning feeling all day and night around the edges of his heart.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1836351
#49. Love ... was part imagination, its web spun as much in the dark lonely separated evenings of longing as in the shared times together.

Niall Williams

Niall Williams Quotes #1838726

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