79 Quotes by Niall Williams

Faith is the most peculiar thing. It’s Number One in human mysteries. Because how do you do it? Where do you learn it?

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.

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.

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.

He loved the strange privacy of being different.

There’s a book inside you. There’s a library inside me.

Stephen did not intend to go to the concert, not because he disapproved or wanted to distance himself from the notion of such music in a place like west Clare, but because there would be people there.

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.

Dad moved in with the baffled deepsea shyness of a character just arriving in a story already underway.