Quotes by Joy Williams

“As you grow older, youll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.”

“There must be something beyond love. I want to get there.”

“Everything is gone. And its not so much the material things. Its just ... thats home.”

“Its really been rough. We just moved in a house with me and my kid, and everything is gone.”

“The woods were wild at nightfall. She heard dim crashing and splashes and the bark of a dog, and through the gaps in the trees was a mottled sky of fading pink and grey discs, microbes moving toward the west. She had almost gotten away but not in time and now leaving wouldnt save her. She lay down on the deck with the woods all around her.”

She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. Shed remain outside the public sector. Shed be an anarchist, shed travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. Shed fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. Shed really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. Shed have different names, a.k.a. Snake, a.k.a. Snow - no that was juvenile. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.

Katherine feels that she must have learned something about marriage from being married before that is now working to her benefit. However, she doesnt know quite what it is, or how, actually, it works.

You dont believe in Nature anymore. Its too isolated from you. Youve abstracted it. Its so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel lifes highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.

Thats nice, isnt it? Edith said. That little kid is so trusting its kind of holy, but if his trust were misplaced it would really be holy.

Imagination only fails us in the end, when the stories we tell ourselves have to stop.

The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.A writer I very much admire is Don DeLillo. At an awards ceremony for him at the Folger Library several years ago, I said that he was like a great shark moving hidden in our midst, beneath the din and wreck of the moment, at apocalyptic ease in the very elements of our psyche and times that are most troublesome to us, that we most fear.Why do I write? Because I wanna be a great shark too. Another shark. A different shark, in a different part of the ocean. The ocean is vast.

There was something shameful about surviving sorrow. You were corrupted. She was corrupted. She was no good anymore. She was inauthentic, apocryphal. She wanted to be a seeker and to travel further and further. But after sorrow, such traveling is not a climbing but a sinking to a depth leached of light at which you are unfit to endure. And yet you endure there.

hThere was something shameful about surviving sorrow. You were corrupted. She was corrupted. She was no good anymore. She was inauthentic, apocryphal. She wanted to be a seeker and to travel further and further. But after sorrow, such traveling is not a climbing but a sinking to a depth leached of light at which you are unfit to endure. And yet you endure there.

For centuries poets, some poets, have tried to give a voice to the animals, and readers, some readers, have felt empathy and sorrow. If animals did have voices, and they could speak with the tongues of angels--at the very least with the tongues of angels--they would be unable to save themselves from us. What good would language do? Their mysterious otherness has not saved them, nor have their beautiful songs and coats and skins and shells and eyes. We discover the remarkable intelligence of the whale, the wolf, the elephant--it does not save them, nor does our awareness of the complexity of their lives. Their strength, their skills, their swiftness, the beauty of their flights. It matters not, it seems, whether they are large or small, proud or shy, docile or fierce, wild or domesticated, whether they nurse their young or brood patiently on eggs. If they eat meat, we decry their viciousness; if they eat grasses and seeds, we dismiss them as weak. There is not one of them, not even the songbird who cannot, who does not, conflict with man and his perceived needs and desires. St. Francis converted the wolf of Gubbio to reason, but he performed this miracle only once and as miracles go, it didn’t seem to capture the public’s fancy. Humans don’t want animals to reason with them. It would be a disturbing, unnerving, diminishing experience; it would bring about all manner of awkwardness and guilt.

You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such great care that you think it will never end, you long for it not to end, and then you wake and know that, indeed, they have not brought you back.

Anthropomorphism originally meant the attribution of human characteristics to God. It is curious that the word is now used almost exclusively to ascribe human characteristics--such as fidelity or altruism or pride, or emotions such as love, embarrassment, or sadness--to the nonhuman animal. One is guilty of anthropomorphism, though it is no longer a sacrilegious word. It is a derogatory, dismissive one that connotes a sort of rampant sentimentality. It’s just another word in the arsenal of the many words used to attack the animal rights movement.

The writer doesn’t want to disclose or instruct or advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery, he cares for it like a fugitive in his cabin, his cave. He doesn’t want to talk it into giving itself up. He would never turn it in to the authorities, the mass mind. The writer is somewhat of a fugitive himself, actually. He wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by writing, transcendthem. The writer does not like to follow orders, not even the orders of his own organizing intellect.

He could almost taste the tang of that swampy air right here in his own desert parking lot and hear the calls of the heavily beating flock, sorrowing and apologizing and making plans for some other time. Time. He realized that crows had always reminded him of time, dark time. He gazed at the backs of his hands, at the plummy dark repellent veins.

“She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. Shed remain outside the public sector. Shed be an anarchist, shed travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. Shed fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. Shed really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. Shed have different names, a.k.a. Snake, a.k.a. Snow - no that was juvenile. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.”