67 Quotes by William Maxwell

But to live in the world at all is to be committed to some kind of a journey... On a turning earth, in a mechanically revolving universe, there is no place to stand still. Neither the destination nor the point of departure are important. People often find themselves midway on a journey they had no intention of taking and that began they are not exactly sure where.

If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.'(from "The Front and the Back Parts of the House", 1991)

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.

Innocence is defined in dictionaries as freedom from guilt or sin, especially from lack of knowledge; purity of heart; blamelessness; guilelessness; simplicity, etc.

Cletus and his father go out looking for the hired man and find him lying in a ditch a quarter mile from home . . . The next day he is up in time to help with the chores. He is deathly pale and his hands shake. Nobody mentions his absence and he is not apologetic--just withdrawn. As if he had answered a summons and is in no way responsible for what followed.

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.

Ono što mi, ili barem ja, samouvjereno smatramo sjećanjem - znači, trenutak, prizor, činjenicu koja je fiksirana i tako spašena od zaborava - ustvari je oblik pripovijedanja koje se trajno odvija u umu i često s kazivanjem mijenja. Uključeno je previše proturječnih emocionalnih interesa da bi život ikada bio potpuno prihvatljiv, i možda je pripovjedačeva zadaća preurediti stvari tako da se prilagode tom cilju. U svakom slučaju, govoreći o prošlosti, lažemo sa svakim udisajem.

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

With the help of these and other commonplace objects—with the help also of the two big elm trees that shaded the house from the heat of the sun, and the trumpet vine by the back door, and the white lilac bush by the dining-room window, and the comfortable wicker porch furniture and the porch swing that contributed its creak…creak…to the sounds of the summer night—I got from one day to the next.