25 Quotes by William Giraldi

Be sweet to one another. Stay in this beauty and brawl against the world's power of pulling apart. Recall Old Testament terminology: covenant, sacred, sacrifice. And mind always that Adam wasn’t a schlep fruitily duped by Eve. He turned his back on God because he knew that a paradise without her was no paradise at all.

I keep wondering what would have happened if his unquiet mother had hoarded books instead of semiautomatic weapons.

For a time I hovered in that peaceful dreamland where nothing at all works properly but everything is okay.

Insecure or homicidal: the adjectives don't bother me one bit.

If writers' aesthetics are not moral, if they do not comprehend that style is inextricable from morality, then they're just goofing off on their way to being forgotten.

This land has hosted horrors most don’t care to count. Wolfsbane. But we are the hemlock, the bane of the wolf.

I looked up fairness in the dictionary and it was not there.

Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can’t for long conceal the toxic spots on your character—Philip Larkin is Exhibit A—nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom.

It’s shameful that today’s mouthy political expositors aren’t better versed in Orwell. Can you imagine a theatre director who hasn’t studied Shakespeare?