21 Quotes by Will Willingham

There in the moonlit silence, Will found himself wanting. Lacking, yes. He always found himself lacking. But tonight he also found himself wanting something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. A wishing he felt in his chest and as the silence grew more quiet, the wanting grew more noisy.

Will asked the same questions as many times as he’d read the verse. What did Keats want to do, why would it take so many years, and what the hell ever got done just because a guy decided to overwhelm himself in poetry called by an old fashioned word?

He harbored a hidden inclination toward poetry but in the hard boiled world of adjusting, reading a sonnet seemed like something that could get a guy killed. It was perfect, Ben had told him. Like a book with a compartment cut out of the pages to hide a flask of whiskey, this one also let a guy hide a secret vice: the cover was bound upside down. So he could read the book, and if anyone saw him, it would look like he was posing.Plausible deniability.

Reading poetry on the page is nice, Will. But it’s not all it could be. Reading it aloud—or hearing it read—gives it another dimension. It’s as though vocalizing the words completes the poem.

The question is what story do you need to tell, in order to give notice to that thing with fangs that keeps chewing through your insides.

She was back. Even so, Will didn't move. He would wait her out, fake-relaxing in the uncomfortable chair with his head not against the wall, tapping his hands to Bureaucratic Barbara's brainwashing beat as an act of solidarity with every other man she'd tried to enervate with her bell and refusal to offer change.[inner dialog of Will Phillips]

Poetry can be a peculiar gateway, Will. It can be a way into all kinds of things that don’t seem to have a way in, or that we don’t even know we want in.

The thing people don't always want to realize is that stories have great power whether they get told or not.

The most simple and mundane things can take on deep and memorable dimensions depending on where we are, or with whom, or any number of things.