Niall Williams Quotes

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.

It was as if we were at the heart of a maze. We were overwhelmed by the enormity of the tasks ahead. Mary had given us a bottle of milk and a spoonful of loose tea, and so, unable to decide what to do, we did what all Irish men and women do: we had tea. Suddenly the sun appeared and not for the first or last time we felt it uplifting us and changing everything. It seemed like a holiday.

Each family functions in their own way, by rules reinvented daily. The strangeness of each of us is somehow accommodated so that there can be such a thing as family and we can all live for some time at least in the same house. Normal is what you know.

It's a blindness thing, faith.

A truly extraordinary work: vivid, passionate and utterly compelling. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is raw as a wound. It opens a world that is strange, brutal and poetic at once and ultimately achieves the kind of spirit-healing few novels do

When you’re different you’ve got two choices. You can stand out or you step back.

Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it’s definitely a Thing with Claws.

Somehow the river is louder when you cover your ears.

We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this 'Ah', because there's something in them that's brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here's the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling 'why am I so ordinary?', you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn't realised or you'd forgotten human beings could shine so.

When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds

The world is more outlandish than some people’s imaginations.

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are

There are only three great puzzles in the world, the puzzle of love, the puzzle of death, and, between each of these and part of both of them, the puzzle of God. God is the greatest puzzle of all.

The water is this marvellous blue. It’s so blue that once you see it you realise you’ve never seen blue before. That other thing you were calling blue is some other colour, it’s not blue. This, this is blue. It’s a blue that comes down from the sky into the water so that when you look in the sea you think sky and when you look at the sky you think sea.