50 Quotes by William Trevor

Concealed from the public eye, snug within his coffin, Mr Bird looked as he had looked in life. Despite his size and the flowing bulk of his flesh, he had borne always, since a child, the grey pallor of death; and he had a way of seeming as still as a statue.

All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife's response that came - as if in compensation for too little said before - when he wondered why his wandering had led him back to these old battlefields: in his sixty-ninth year he was establishing his survivor's status.

Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel.

He was new to London in those days, and he had not liked it. He had not cared for the intensity of the traffic, or the underground trains that were full of a human smell and of people who lit up tipped cigarettes and pushed with their elbows.

I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. 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. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.

When Mr Bird had written his will and had read it over he became aware that he was laughing. He heard the sound for some time, a minute or a minute and a quarter, and then he recognized its source and wondered why he was laughing like that, such a quiet, slurping sound, like the lapping of water.

People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.

I cried myself, thinking of the grass growing on her tennis court, and the cruelty that was natural.

Extraordinary things have happened to me in this city,' said Mrs Eckdorf in the bar of her hotel at half-past one on the morning of August 11th. 'You would scarce believe,' she said.