Niall Williams, History of the Rain
8 quotes
"All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are"
"We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling."
"Writing is a sickness only cured by writing."
"It's a blindness thing, faith."
"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"
"It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul."
"You can't be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you're beautiful people will be looking at you."
"Human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become."