William Maxwell Quotes & Sayings

And looking at these faded snapshots I see, the child that survives in me sees with a pang that - I am old enough to be that man's father, and he has been dead for nearly twenty years, and yet it troubles me that he was happy. Why? In some way his happiness was at that time (and forever after, it would seem) a threat to me. It was not the kind of happiness that children are included in, but why should that trouble me now? I do not even begin to understand it. — William Maxwell

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

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

Your reader is at least as bright as you are — William Maxwell

Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera. — William Maxwell

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

Without the heavy set aristocratic man snoring away on his side of the bed, without the fresh-eyed child whose hair ribbon needs retying; without the conversation at meals and the hearty appetites and getting dressed for church on time; without the tears of laughter or the worry about making both ends meet, the unpaid bills, the layoffs, both seasonal and unexpected; without the toys that have to picked up lest somebody trip over them, and the seven shirts that have to be washed and ironed, one for every day in the week; without the scraped knee and the hurt feelings, the misunderstandings that need to be cleared up, the voices calling for her so that she is perpetually having to stop what she is doing and go see what they want - without all this, what have you? A mystery: How is it that she didn't realize it was going to last such a short time? — William Maxwell

The values and assumptions of that household I took in without knowing when or how it happened, and I have them to this day: The pleasure in sharing pleasure. The belief that is is only proper to help lame dogs to get over stiles and young men to put one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. An impatient disregard for small sums of money. The belief that it is a sin against Nature to put sugar in one's tea. The preference for being home over being anywhere else. The belief that generous impulses should be acted on, whether you can afford to do this or not. The trust in premonitions and the knowledge of what is in wrapped packages. The willingness to go to any amount of trouble to make yourself comfortable. The tendency to take refuge in absolutes. The belief that you don't have to apologize for tears; that consoling words should never be withheld; that what somebody wants very much they should, if possible, have. — William Maxwell

Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about. What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead they don't read books. This I find unbearable. — William Maxwell

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

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

Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep. — William Maxwell

The music of Beethoven's Fidelio always rises up in my mind when I think of that meeting in the forest, and my throat constricts with an emotion that is, I'm afraid, purely factitious--unless feelings are more a part of our physical inheritance than is commonly believed, in which case it is Mary Edie's joy, unquenchable, passed on, and then passed on again, generation after generation, along with the color of eyes and the shape of hands and characteristic habits of mind and temperament. — William Maxwell

It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer. — William Maxwell

But he was careful. He didn't make a simple remark without rehearsing it beforehand. And he continually removed the expression from his face lest it be the wrong one, and give him away. He also avoided any strong light, such as the lamp on the kitchen table. Sometimes a weakness overcame him, his legs were unstrung, and he had to find some place to sit down, but this was easy enough to disguise. It was his voice that gave him the most trouble. It sounded false to him and not like his voice at all. — William Maxwell

It would have been a help if at some time Baptist preacher, resting his forearms on the pulpit and hunching his shoulders, had said People neither get what they deserve nor deserve what they get. The gentle and the trusting are trampled on. The rich man usually forces his way through the eye of the needle, and there is little or no point in putting your faith in Divine Providence. . . . On the other hand, how could any preacher, Baptist or otherwise, say this? — William Maxwell

Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to. — William Maxwell

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

It was the unexpected that happened, always. — William Maxwell

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

Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn't be crossed. — William Maxwell

It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn't be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn't be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune than anybody else, and the idea that kept recurring to me...was that 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. Actually, it was other way round: I hadn't gone anywhere and nothing was changed, so far as the roof over our heads was concerned, it was just that she was in the cemetery. — William Maxwell

There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one's parents. Death, about which so much mystery is made,is perhaps no mystery at all. But the history of one's parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and characters guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that projects one small surface above the level of smooth lawn, and when you come to dig around it, it proves to be too large ever to move, though each year's frost forces it up a little higher. — William Maxwell

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

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

When my father was getting along in years and the past began to figure more in his conversation, I asked him one day what my mother was like. I knew what she was like as my mother but I thought it was time somebody told me what she was like as a person. To my surprise he said, "That's water over the dam," shutting me up but also leaving me in doubt, because of his abrupt tone of voice, whether he didn't after all this time have any feeling about her much, or did have but didn't think he ought to. In any case he didn't feel like talking about her to me. — William Maxwell

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

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

If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth. — William Maxwell

At that period, rising in the world meant giving up working with your hands in favor of work in a store or an office. The people who lived in town had made it, and turned their backs socially on those who had not but were still growing corn and wheat out there in the country. What seemed like an impassable gulf was only the prejudice of a single generation, which refused to remember its own not very remote past. — William Maxwell

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

It is impossible to say why people put so little value on complete happiness. — William Maxwell

...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

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

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory
meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion
is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw. — William Maxwell

The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet — William Maxwell

It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about. — William Maxwell

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

I am the cat that walks alone. — William Maxwell

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

A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation. — William Maxwell

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope. — William Maxwell

One can grieve over all the water that has ever flowed over the dam. — William Maxwell

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

That's what I try to do - write sentences that won't be like sand castles. — William Maxwell

The world (including Drapervilleh is not a nice place, and the innocent and the young have to take their chances. They cannot be watched over, twenty-four hours of the day. At what moment, from what hiding-place, the idea of evil will strike, there is no telling. And when it does, the result is not always disastrous. Children have their own incalculable strength and weakness, and this, for all their seeming helplessness, will determine the pattern of their lives. Even when you suspect why they fall downstairs, you cannot be sure. You have no way of knowing whether their fright is permanent or can be healed by putting butter on the large lump that comes out on their foreheads after a fall. — William Maxwell

Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well. — William Maxwell

My father represented authority, which meant - to me - that he could not also represent understanding. — William Maxwell

To be up to the eyebrows in a great work of literature is such happiness. — William Maxwell

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

in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw. Before — William Maxwell

If the Lowland farmer spoke with an uncouth accent, dressed in rags, lived in a miserable hovel, and fed on the same grain he fed his animals, it was not because he was a savage but because the relentless marauding of the English left him with very little choice. As for why he didn't simply cut his throat, the answer is that he was a Presbyterian and did not expect much in the way of earthly happiness. — William Maxwell

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

The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters — William Maxwell

What distinguished the murder of Lloyd Wilson from all the others was a fact so shocking that the Lincoln Courier-Herald hesitated several days before printing it: The murderer had cut off the dead man's ear with a razor and carried it away with him. In that pre-Freudian era people did not ask themselves what the ear might be a substitution for, but merely shuddered. — William Maxwell

I have liked remembering almost as much as I have liked living. — William Maxwell

The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice, — William Maxwell

But to live in the world at all is to be committed to some kind of a journey. — William Maxwell