Joy Williams Quotes & Sayings

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

He had dreamed, he had dreamed...it left him. — Joy Williams

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

You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such great care that you think it will never end, you long for it not to end, and then you wake and know that, indeed, they have not brought you back. — Joy Williams

Memory is the resurrection. The dead move among us the living in our memory and that is the resurrection. — Joy Williams

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

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

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

Anthropomorphism originally meant the attribution of human characteristics to God. It is curious that the word is now used almost exclusively to ascribe human characteristics
such as fidelity or altruism or pride, or emotions such as love, embarrassment, or sadness
to the nonhuman animal. One is guilty of anthropomorphism, though it is no longer a sacrilegious word. It is a derogatory, dismissive one that connotes a sort of rampant sentimentality. It's just another word in the arsenal of the many words used to attack the animal rights movement. — Joy Williams

I've seen what comes next. Vigils. Concern is the new consumerism. A person's worth can be measured by the number and intensity of his concerns. Candles, lighting a candle, confers the kind of fulfillment that only empty ritual can bring. Empty ritual's important. It's coming back as a force in people's lives. Its role is being acknowledged. It's the keystone for tomorrow's dealings in an annexed and exploited world. And holding a candle, cradling a little flame with others holding their candle, cradling their little flame gives people the opportunity to experience something bigger than themselves without surrendering themselves to it. — Joy Williams

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

Shooting felt good. Joy consists in this, after all, the increase of one's power. — Joy Williams

I navigate my passage across the first monstrous intersection, where a sign announces the imminent arrival of a dessert parlor named Better Than Sex. I would like to move to the country but the boy refuses. Besides, "the country" exists only in our fantasies anymore. When I was a child, the country was where overly exuberant family pets often found themselves."
"I navigate my passage across the first monstrous intersection, where a sign announces the imminent arrival of a dessert parlor named Better Than Sex. I would like to move to the country but the boy refuses. Besides, "the country" exists only in our fantasies anymore. When I was a child, the country was where overly exuberant family pets often found themselves."
- Joy Williams from The Country — Joy Williams

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

He could almost taste the tang of that swampy air right here in his own desert parking lot and hear the calls of the heavily beating flock, sorrowing and apologizing and making plans for some other time. Time. He realized that crows had always reminded him of time, dark time. He gazed at the backs of his hands, at the plummy dark repellent veins. — Joy Williams

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

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

Regarding life, it is much the best to think that the experiences we have are necessary for us. It is by means of experience that we develop and not through our imagination. Imagination is nothing. Explanation is nothing. One can only experience and somehow describe
with, in Camus's phrase, lucid indifference. At the same time, experience is fundamentally illusory. When one is experiencing emotional pain or grief, one feels that everything that happens in life is unreal. And this is a right understanding of life. — Joy Williams

I believe that God is (and must be) a transcendent presence in any worthy work of art. — Joy Williams

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

The Lord was in line at the pharmacy counter waiting to get His shingles shot. — Joy Williams

You should have changed if you wanted to remain yourself but you were afraid to change. — Joy Williams

One writes to find words' meanings. — Joy Williams

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

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

The Lord was living with a great colony of bats in a cave. Two boys with BB guns found the cave and killed many of the bats outright, leaving many more to die of their injuries. The boys didn't see the Lord. He didn't make His presence known to them. On the other hand, the Lord was very fond of the bats but had done nothing to save them. He was becoming harder and harder to comprehend. He liked to hang with the animals, everyone knew that, the whales and bears, the elephants and bighorn sheep and wolves. They were rather wishing He wasn't so partial to their company. Hang more in the world of men, they begged Him. But the Lord said He was lonely there. — Joy Williams

As you grow older, you'll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends. — Joy Williams

Imagination only fails us in the end, when the stories we tell ourselves have to stop. — Joy Williams

A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light. — Joy Williams

Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead fought continuously and as bitterly as vipers. Their arguments were baroque, stately and, although frequently extraordinary, never enlightening. — Joy Williams

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

Mornings, out in the garden, she would, at times, read aloud from one of her many overdue library books. Dew as radiant as angel spit glittered on the petals of Jack's roses. Jack was quite the gardener. Miriam thought she knew why her particularly favored roses. The inside of a rose does not at all correspond with its exterior beauty. If one tears off all the petals of the corolla, all that remains is a sordid-looking tuft. Roses would be right up Jack's alley, all right.
"Here's something for you, Jack," Miriam said. You'll appreciate this. Beckett describes tears as 'liquified brain.'
"God, Miriam," Jack said. "Why are you sharing that with me? Look at this day, it's a beautiful day! Stop pumping out the cesspit! Leave the cesspit alone! — Joy Williams

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

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

Above me, billboards advertise gun shows, mobile-telephone plans and law firms that specialize in drunk-driving cases. I looked into renting a billboard recently but my application was rejected.

THE GREATEST PROSPERITY COMES TO ITS END,
DISSOLVING INTO EMPTINESS; THE MIGHTIEST
EMPIRE IS OVERTAKEN BY STUPOR AMIDST
THE FLICKER OF ITS FESTIVAL LIGHTS
-Rabindrath Tagore

it would have said.

The billboard people told me they didn't know who Rabindranath Tagore was and could not verify anything he might have thought. He was certainly foreign and his sentiments insurrectionary. As well, what he was saying wasn't advertising anything. This night I see that space I tried to claim depicts black-and-white cows painting the words EAT MORE CHICKEN on the side of a barn. — Joy Williams

Did the walls of the barn start to tremble
With a glory they could not contain?
Did anyone wake with the feeling
Of peace that they could not explain?
Oh the love must have been overwhelming
As it warmed everyone in it's flow
For all of the earth is still telling
of 2000 Decembers ago. — Joy Williams

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

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

Someone once told me a story about long term relationships. To think of them as a continent to explore. I could spend a lifetime backpacking through Africa, and I would still never know all there is to know about that continent. To stay the course, to stay intentional, to stay curious and connected - that's the heart of it. But it's so easy to lose track of the trail, to get tired, to want to give up, or to want a new adventure. It can be so easy to lose sight of the goodness and mystery within the person sitting right in front of you. — Joy Williams

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do. — Joy Williams

The Lord was in a den with a pack of wolves. You really are so intelligent, the Lord said, and have such glorious eyes. Why do you think you're hounded so? It's like they want to exterminate you, it's awful. Well, sometimes it's the calves and the cows, the wolves said. Oh those maddening cows, the Lord said. I have a suggestion. What if I caused you not to have a taste for them anymore? It wouldn't matter. Then it would be the deer or the elk. Have you seen the bumper stickers on the hunters' trucks - DID A WOLF GET YOUR ELK? I guess I missed that, the Lord said. Sentiment is very much against us down here, the wolves said. I'm so awfully sorry, the Lord said. Thank you for inviting us to participate in your plan anyway, the wolves said politely. The Lord did not want to appear addled, but what was the plan His sons were referring to exactly? FATHERS AND SONS — Joy Williams

The writer doesn't want to disclose or instruct or advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery, he cares for it like a fugitive in his cabin, his cave. He
doesn't want to talk it into giving itself up. He would never turn it in to the authorities, the mass mind. The writer is somewhat of a fugitive himself, actually. He wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by writing, transcend
them. The writer does not like to follow orders, not even the orders of his own organizing intellect. — Joy Williams

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

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

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

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

Every living thing suffers transfiguration. Yes, until the creation of Eve, Adam had fondled beasts. — Joy Williams

Have a nice remainder of the rest of your life. — Joy Williams

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

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

Down in the kitchen, I open the refrigerator. There is nothing there but the prize steer of the county fair, rearranged in neat and mysterious packages. Daily, the cook pushes her hand into the cold. The result in uncertain. A gristly Ouija. It could be pot roast or brisket, eye of the round or sirloin tip. The steer has invaded their lives. He is everywhere. There is no room for the sisters' diet-cola or for their underwear on sizzling mornings. They have been eating him for weeks. — Joy Williams

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

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

There was something shameful about surviving sorrow. You were corrupted. She was corrupted. She was no good anymore. She was inauthentic, apocryphal. She wanted to be a seeker and to travel further and further. But after sorrow, such traveling is not a climbing but a sinking to a depth leached of light at which you are unfit to endure. And yet you endure there. — Joy Williams

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

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

I think I had the same notion most people have, which is it's simply a town that percolates around country music. Though country-music history is deep and richly steeped throughout the city, this is a place that's been expanding musically and culturally ... People coming from Europe and Canada-there are all kinds of different cultures and different music being represented here. It continues to blossom. — Joy Williams

Clouds aren't as pretty as they used to be. That's a known fact. — Joy Williams

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

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

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

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

We are saved not because we are worthy. We are saved because we are loved. — Joy Williams

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible. — Joy Williams

Love is further than death. — Joy Williams

That was the problem with public art, it risked great ridicule. — Joy Williams

Pearl suspected God didn't love human beings much. She suspected that what He loved most was Nothingness. — Joy Williams

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

She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter. — Joy Williams

I believe in guilt. There's not enough guilt around these days for my taste. — Joy Williams

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

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

One is always enthralled, I think, when a young writer you're just beginning to read and comprehend dies. — Joy Williams

Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly. — Joy Williams

Words at night were feral things. — Joy Williams