Top 41 William Maxwell Quotes
#1. You cannot go to the cemetery and ask to be enlightened on matters of this kind, though it would ease my mind considerably if you could.
William Maxwell
#2. With no sense of the passing of time, they held each other and lost themselves in the opening, unmasking tenderness that always comes after a satisfactory quarrel.
William Maxwell
#3. It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.
William Maxwell
#4. My father represented authority, which meant - to me - that he could not also represent understanding.
William Maxwell
#5. It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.
William Maxwell
#6. If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.
William Maxwell
#7. As he turned away I had the feeling he had washed his hands of me. Was I not the kind of little boy he wanted to have?
William Maxwell
#8. Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera.
William Maxwell
#9. If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.
William Maxwell
#10. A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own.
William Maxwell
#12. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn't be crossed.
William Maxwell
#13. They had stopped shouting at each other and put their faith in legal counsel. With the result that how things could be made to look was what counted, not how they actually were.
William Maxwell
#14. Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.
William Maxwell
#15. I have liked remembering almost as much as I have liked living.
William Maxwell
#16. To be up to the eyebrows in a great work of literature is such happiness.
William Maxwell
#17. He would reject four in a row and find himself hurriedly acting on the fifth. His feet took him there, without his consent. He might as well have given in in the first place.
William Maxwell
#18. Innocence is defined in dictionaries as freedom from guilt or sin, especially from lack of knowledge; purity of heart; blamelessness; guilelessness; simplicity, etc.
William Maxwell
#19. It is impossible to say why people put so little value on complete happiness.
William Maxwell
#20. One can grieve over all the water that has ever flowed over the dam.
William Maxwell
#21. When he turned and walked into the living room he knew instantly why it was that he hadn't wanted to come here, and that he ought to get out as soon as he possibly could. There, staring him in the face, was everything he'd been deprived of for the last five years.
William Maxwell
#22. Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love.
William Maxwell
#23. People often ask themselves the right questions. Where they fail is in answering the questions they ask themselves, and even there they do not fail by much ... But it takes time, it takes humility and a serious reason for searching.
William Maxwell
#24. Oh, and it's also Reaming Day, the day where the kids between the ages of twelve to eighteen are chosen to participate in the Hunger But Mainly DeathGames, which, as you might expect from the name, is a tournament in which kidsfight to the death, and occasionally experience hunger.
William Maxwell
#25. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters.' (from "The Man in the Moon")
William Maxwell
#26. That's what I try to do - write sentences that won't be like sand castles.
William Maxwell
#27. His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.
William Maxwell
#28. The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice,
William Maxwell
#29. My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.
William Maxwell
#31. I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn't have gone through and couldn't get back to the place I hadn't meant to leave.
William Maxwell
#33. ...human thought is by no means as private as it seems, and all that you need to read somebody else's mind is the willingness to read your own.
William Maxwell
#34. in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw. Before
William Maxwell
#35. Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.
William Maxwell
#36. Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).
William Maxwell
#38. The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet
William Maxwell
#39. What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.
William Maxwell
#40. But to live in the world at all is to be committed to some kind of a journey.
William Maxwell
#41. They looked at me, and were so full of delight in the pleasure they were giving me that some final thread of resistance gave way and I understood not only how entirely generous they were but also that generosity might be the greatest pleasure there is.
William Maxwell
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