79 Quotes by Niall Williams

So she sees if she can drive him off. The MacCarrolls have that little perverse streak in them. She’d rather break her own heart than have it broken. There’s an Irish logic to it.

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.

When I was twelve years old god spoke to my father for the first time.

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

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.

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.

She doesn’t know poets can have ash in the soul, or that after so much burning there comes a time when there’s nothing left but blowing away or phoenix-rising.

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.

I sometimes think the worst thing a young person can feel is when you can find no answer to the question of what you are supposed to do with this life you’ve been given.