50 Quotes by William Trevor

Major Eele observed Studdy clumsily thinking. He saw an opportunity to create a pleasant mischief and did so immediately.

It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more.

He should in humility have asked her why it was that he was naturally a cuckold, why two women of different temperaments and characters had been inspired to have lovers at his expense. He should be telling her, with the warmth of her body warming his, that his second wife had confessed to greater sexual pleasure when she remembered that she was deceiving him.

A person's life isn't orderly ...it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present's hardly there; the future doesn't exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.

I turned away from a bearded face. I put Elsie Timson's holy book down a lavatory. At St Monica's School for Girls I sat in innocence, drinking cocoa with Miss Tample until Miss Tample became a monster. My father ran away, my mother was disgraceful. God is in this kitchen,' cried Mrs Eckdorf. 'God is revealing Himself through that sleeping woman.

People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.

Studdy was thinking that the creature was an animal; he was saying to himself that it was surely in error that she had become a member of the human race.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.