Niall Williams Quotes & Sayings

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

But if there's one sure way not to forget something it's to say Forget That. — Niall Williams

People are odd creations, this is my theme. — Niall Williams

Between the emotion and the response falls the shadow, T.S. Eliot said, — Niall Williams

I've had stupid teachers, lazy teachers, boring teachers, teachers who were teachers because their parents were and they hadn't the imagination to think of anything else, teachers who were teachers because of cowardice, because of fear, because of the holidays, because of the pensions, because they were never called to account, never had to actually be any good, ones who could not survive in any other profession, who were not aware they had trod on butterflies. But none of those compared to Mr Maurice Crossan. He was the one who first stamped on my brother's soul. He was dark, as they say here. For those who want more of him visit the dark character of Orlick Dolge in Great Expectations and cross that with a ginger-headed weasel. — Niall Williams

It was as if we were at the heart of a maze. We were overwhelmed by the enormity of the tasks ahead. Mary had given us a bottle of milk and a spoonful of loose tea, and so, unable to decide what to do, we did what all Irish men and women do: we had tea. Suddenly the sun appeared and not for the first or last time we felt it uplifting us and changing everything. It seemed like a holiday. — Niall Williams

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

He spoke on rising toes, on rolling ankles, he spoke with forward tilt, with lifted shoulders, with forefinger pointing and fist punching. He did verbal pirouettes, he did elongated sentences, he let clauses gather at the river and foam until they found spittle release. He spoke hushed, he spoke his big points in whispers, then drove them in with urgent balletic waves of arm and extended eyebrow as he said the same thing again only louder. He was not then a guns and bombs nationalist. He was the more dangerous kind. He was a poems and stories one. — Niall Williams

The more you hope the more you hurt. You drop a letter in a Holy Communion envelope in the postbox and already you are waiting for a reply. Human beings were built for response. But human nature can't tolerate too much waiting. Between the emotion and the response falls the shadow, T.S. Eliot said, and that was the principle that inspired texting, that came up with the shortest possible time, basically as fast as Sheila Geary's two thumbs could hammer ILY on a tiny keyboard and get Johnny Johnston's ILY2 back, so that between emotion and response now there wasn't all that much shadow. All writers are waiting for replies. That's what I've learned. Maybe all human beings are. After the Yeats classes my father returned — Niall Williams

In love everything changes, and continues changing all the time. There is no stillness, no stopped clock of the heart in which the moment of happiness holds forever, but only the constant whirring forward motion of desire and need, rising and falling, falling and rising, full of doubts then certainties that moment by moment change and become doubts again. — Niall Williams

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

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

It is what writers do, imagine and feel the pain of others, sometimes at the expense of feeling their own. Here, then, in these pages is mine, the fear of death, of loss, of unexpressed love. Here is the truth told in a story. And in the telling of it perhaps I have found some way to have courage, to believe. — Niall Williams

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

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

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

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

Mam drove the same way she walked, freestyle, also known as bumpily. She didn't really go in for right- and left-hand lanes, which was fine this side of Faha where the road is cart-wide and Mohawked with a raised rib of grass and when two cars meet there is no hope of passing, someone has to throw back a left arm and reverse to the nearest gap or gate, which Faha folks do brilliantly, flooring the accelerator and racing in soft zigzag to where they have just been, defeating time and space both and making a nonsense of past and present, here and there. As any student of Irish history ancient and recent will know, we are a nation of magnificent reversers. — Niall Williams

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

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

A central principle underlying Mrs Quinty's Rules for Writing is that you have to have a Beginning Middle and End. If you don't have these your Reader is lost. But what if Lost is exactly where the writer is? I asked her. Ruth, the writer can't be lost, she said, and then knew she'd said it too quickly and bit her lip knowing I was going to say something about Dad. She pressed her knees together and diverted into a fit of dry coughing. This, Dear Reader, is a river narrative. My chosen style is The Meander. I know that in The Brothers Karamazov (Book 1,777, Penguin Classics, London) Ippolit Kirillovich chose the historical form of narration because Dostoevsky says it checked his own exuberant rhetoric. Beginnings middles and ends force you into that place where you have to Stick to the Story as Maeve Mulvey said the night the Junior Certs were supposed to be going to the cinema in Ennis but were buying cans in Dunnes and drinking — Niall Williams

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

Chapter 19 Where are you, Aeney? You slip away from me as you always did. Where are you? — Niall Williams

Somehow the river is louder when you cover your ears. — Niall Williams

But he didn't answer. He just cried on, this hopeless hard retching as if the tears were shards and each one cut as it came out. He was sitting on the floor up against the door so I couldn't get in and Mam was gone to take Nan to Murphy's so I just sank down on the floor on the other side of the door and because of the force of his crying the door and the whole partition wall kind of gave a little, these jagged ebbs and flows, as if the whole upstairs was in a storm, and my brother was in another boat sailing away, and no matter how much I wanted to, no matter what I did or said I would never be able to get to him. — Niall Williams

My father is in a new version of Heaven. He hasn't time to consider it yet, whether he is happy because he is hastening along the road with his father as day breaks, or just because he was asked to come and that now this is actually happening, or because he has been asked for a speech from Shakespeare and the phrases are coming like a long golden thread out of his mouth even before he has time to think of them. The words are there, and flow, as he works hard to, and now matches the long pole-vault strides of his father. — Niall Williams

The first time I opened one I felt indecent. 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 curled in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it's, well, enveloping. Weird I am. I know. What the Hell? as Bobby Bowe says to everything. You either get it or you don't. When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of the 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; these were the literal original Facebooks, the books where faces had been, and I just loved it, the whole strange sense of being aboard a readership. — Niall Williams

Briefly everything was stopped, as if a hand had reached out and paused the world in its turning.
She stood by the cooker now watching him, the pale blueberries of her eyes, watching him with pride, her two hands brought up to her mouth the way she always did when she had feelings two large for words. — Niall Williams

Because there's no pain yet. There's too much adrenalin and rhetoric in his bloodstream. There's whole chunky paragraphs of What it Means to King and Country. Never mind God. There's fine speeches still pumping up along his arteries, principal and subordinate clauses, the adjectival, the adverbial, in gorgeous Latinate construction and hot breath. It's the Age of Speeches. There's exclamation marks doing needle dancing in his brain, and so he gets twenty yards into the war. — Niall Williams

When you're different you've got two choices. You can stand out or you step back. — Niall Williams

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

The water is this marvellous blue. It's so blue that once you see it you realise you've never seen blue before. That other thing you were calling blue is some other colour, it's not blue. This, this is blue. It's a blue that comes down from the sky into the water so that when you look in the sea you think sky and when you look at the sky you think sea. — Niall Williams

Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this 'Ah', because there's something in them that's brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here's the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling 'why am I so ordinary?', you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn't realised or you'd forgotten human beings could shine so. — Niall Williams

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

They peer in and at the same moment both angle back their heads, as if they have taken a position a little too close to a panoramic screen. They are tall and big-boned and look like men playing women's parts in a play by Oscar Wilde. 'Nan, Verge's sisters are here,' my mother says loudly. But Nan already knows, and furiously pokers the fire to try and smoke them back out. Nan here is The Aged P only with more mischievousness than Mr Wemmick's in Great Expectations, the only book of which my father kept two copies (Books 180 and 400, Penguin Classic & Everyman Classics editions, London), both of which I have read twice, deciding each time that Great Expectations is the Greatest. If you don't agree, stop here, go back and read it again. I'll wait. Or be dead. — Niall Williams

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

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

He loved the strange privacy of being different. — Niall Williams

It's because people are so perishable. That's the thing. Because for everyone you meet there is a last moment, there will be a last moment when your hand slips from theirs, and everything ripples outwards from that, the last firmness of a hand in yours that every moment after becomes a little less firm until you look down at your own hand and try to imagine just what it felt like before their hand slipped away. And you cannot. You cannot feel them. And then you cannot quite see them, there's blurry bits, like you're looking through this watery haze, and you're fighting to see, you're fighting to hold on, but they are perishing right before your eyes, and right before your eyes they are becoming that bit more ghost. — Niall Williams

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

It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul. — Niall Williams

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

..Window panes that rattled under the lash of the wind for two months on end, rain that leaked beneath the doors, her husband out and drinking, electricity cut off and the radio shut down, the boredom, the quiet and incredible loneliness - Margaret Looney would remember when she first discovered love and wonder at how immense it must have been to be lasting so long. — Niall Williams

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

There's a book inside you. There's a library inside me. — Niall Williams

Chapter 12 Your blood is a river. Chapter — Niall Williams

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

Goodness provokes bitchiness. It's mathematical. It's somewhere in the human genes. Any number of lovely poeple are married to horrible ones. Read Middlemarch (Book 989, George Eliot, Penguin Classics, London) if you don't believe me. There's something in me that just can't let it be. Goodness is a tidy bow you just can't help wanting to pull loose. — Niall Williams

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

Writing is a sickness only cured by writing. — Niall Williams

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

Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it's definitely a Thing with Claws. — Niall Williams

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

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

When he was small he held the label inside his pillowcase when he slept. Only I know that. I was not a sleeper. His hand in sleep searched to find it. He would take the label between thumb and forefinger and just move it slightly against itself, over and back, as if the smallest friction was sufficient, as if with that he knew he was still in the world. — Niall Williams

The nobleman fell to his knees. 'Sir, come down to my son ere he die.'
His old face. His love for his son.
None of us spoke, the old man kneeling so.
I watched your eyes. The pity that pooled, this love of the father.
'Go thy way; thy son lives,' you said.
And he raised his face to you, and we could see that he believed. — Niall Williams

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

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

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

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

He knows I have a soft spot for RLS and not just because he was sick or because we have the same initials but because there's something impossibly romantic about him and because before he started writing Treasure Island he first drew a map of an unknown island and because he believed in invisible places and was one of the last writers to know what the word adventure means. I could give you a hundred reasons why RLS is The Man. Look in his The Art of Writing (Book 683, Chatto & Windus, London) where he says that no living people have had the influence on him as strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Or when he says his greatest friend is D'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (Book 5, Regent Classics, London). RLS said: 'When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge, I take them like opium.' And when you read Treasure Island you feel you are casting off. That's the thing. You are casting off and leaving behind the ordinary dullness of the world. — Niall Williams

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

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

If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows. — Niall Williams

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

By the end of that summer in Ashcroft my father had nearly run out of stories. He'd almost read his father's full library and arrived at last at Moby Dick. The edition I have is a Penguin paperback (Book 2,333, Herman Melville, Penguin, London). It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul. Try it, you'll see. — Niall Williams

I look grey. I actually do. Mirrors should be banned, the same way Uncle Noelie banned the News. Both are enemies of hope. Uncle Noelie said he couldn't take listening to the wall-to-wall Doom experts who were the Boom experts before, most of them like a dark neighbour secretly delighted to be part of an important funeral, and so, because the time called for extreme tactics and because your heart has to be sustained by something, he switched over to Lyric FM for Marty in the Morning and shook hands with Mozart. But you can't switch off the mirror, it's right there over the bathroom sink, it's hard to avoid, and in it I'm grey. — Niall Williams

Jimmy Mack said she had Gone-into-Teaching because it was the only place where she could rule without reprisal; where she could give free rein to the awesome dimension of her need to crush things. Mr. Conheedy it seemed had enjoyed this for the first three months of their marriage, but then had run off, Nan said to try and find a female Mrs. Conheedy next time around. — Niall Williams

Fortunately, at that time, Ireland wasn't in the world. So we weren't in the World War. Old Roundrims came up with that. Brilliant, really. World War II was toirmiscthe, he said, which people had to look up but basically turned out to be verboten in Irish. Twitter went crazy, saying it was shameful and backward, but back then twitter was only spoken by birds. — Niall Williams

The tops of pages are river-and-rain-warped, the whole book buckled a bit from travel, age and pockets, but it's a book that feels companionable somehow, if you know what I mean. In it there are many pages with lines underscored, or in some cases with just ascending wing-like Nike tick-marks next to a paragraph. — Niall Williams

Some things, most things in my experience, are more vivid when you haven't seen them, — Niall Williams

At that stage it was generally presumed that I was not someone who was going to Put Faha on the Map and so once the races started I was to share with Dympna Looney the important job of Holding the Ribbon at the finish line, which I didn't think very important but my father said was Homeric, and though I didn't know what that meant it made me feel a little flush of importance. 'Breasting the ribbon, Ruthie,' he said, 'you're the line between one world and another.' He could say things like that. He could say things no other dad could say, and because parents are mysterious anyhow, because they belong in another world, you don't ask, you just nod and feel you've entered a little bit into the mystery yourself. — Niall Williams

The world is more outlandish than some people's imaginations. — Niall Williams

I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know. — Niall Williams

It's a blindness thing, faith. — Niall Williams

Grandmother's English heritage meant that she had that Empire voice, that come-out-of-your-grass-huts-and-give-us-your-treasures-for-our-museums kind of voice. The woman could boom. It was seriously terrifying. Even years later when my father imitated her and she seemed part Margaret Thatcher and part horse Aeney and I were still frightened. — Niall Williams

was open the windows. It could be — Niall Williams

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

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

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

My hope has a small h. — Niall Williams