Joy Williams Quotes

Quotes about:

• Someone once told me a story about long term relationships. To think of them as a continent to explore. I could spend a lifetime backpacking through Africa, and I would still never know all there is to know about that continent. To stay the course, to stay intentional, to stay curious and connected - that's the heart of it. But it's so easy to lose track of the trail, to get tired, to want to give up, or to want a new adventure. It can be so easy to lose sight of the goodness and mystery within the person sitting right in front of you.

  Joy Williams

  Giving Up, Tired, Heart

  49 Copy quote

• The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it.

  Joy Williams

  Doe, Stories, Figures

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• You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.

  Joy Williams

  Mean, Worry, Why Things Happen

  Joy Williams (1978). “The changeling”, Doubleday Books

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• Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.

  Joy Williams

  Inevitable, Irreversible

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• What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes...

  Joy Williams

  Dark, People, Ordinary

  "Joy Williams, The Art of Fiction No. 223". Interview with Paul Winner, www.theparisreview.org. 2014.

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• The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head.

  Joy Williams

  Beautiful, Morning, Writing

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• It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.

  Joy Williams

  Writing, Who Cares, These Days

  Joy Williams (2015). “Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals”, p.177, Rowman & Littlefield

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• I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don't do anything with it, you lose it.

  Joy Williams

  Dream, Thinking, Responsible

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• Words at night were feral things.

  Joy Williams

  Night

  Joy Williams (2016). “The Visiting Privilege”, p.247, Profile Books

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• Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly.

  Joy Williams

  Usual, Done, Courses

  Joy Williams (2016). “The Visiting Privilege”, p.20, Profile Books

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• 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.

  Joy Williams

  Animal, Thinking, Race

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• A side benefit of the new and developing technologies is that soon we won't have to feel guilty about the suffering and denigration of the animals because we will have made them up.

  Joy Williams

  Animal, Technology, Suffering

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• But who knows what good might come from the least of us? From the bones of old horses is made the most beautiful Prussian Blue.

  Joy Williams

  Beautiful, Horse, Blue

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• There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

  Joy Williams

  Writing, Process, Writing Process

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• One writes to find words' meanings.

  Joy Williams

  Writing

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• I believe in guilt. There's not enough guilt around these days for my taste.

  Joy Williams

  Believe, Guilt, Taste

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• A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough.

  Joy Williams

  Thinking, Agents, Enough

  Joy Williams (2015). “Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals”, p.177, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

  Joy Williams

  Writing, Grace, Doe

  Joy Williams (2015). “Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals”, p.184, Rowman & Littlefield

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• There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance.

  Joy Williams

  Dream, Drunk, Type

  Joy Williams (2010). “Taking Care”, p.210, Vintage

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• Did the walls of the barn start to tremble
  With a glory they could not contain?
  Did anyone wake with the feeling
  Of peace that they could not explain?
  Oh the love must have been overwhelming
  As it warmed everyone in it's flow
  For all of the earth is still telling
  of 2000 Decembers ago.

  Joy Williams

  Faith, Wall, Inspiration

  Song: 2000 Decembers Ago

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• Writers are like eremites or anchorites - natural-born eremites or anchorites - who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place.

  Joy Williams

  Caves, Firsts, Natural

  Joy Williams (2015). “Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals”, p.177, Rowman & Littlefield

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• As you grow older, you'll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.

  Joy Williams

  Talking, Stranger, Enjoy

  Joy Williams (2016). “The Visiting Privilege”, p.36, Profile Books

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• 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.

  Joy Williams

  Writing, Wings, Reader

  Joy Williams (2015). “Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals”, p.181, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face.

  Joy Williams

  Writing, Comfort, Faces

  Joy Williams (2015). “Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals”, p.181, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.

  Joy Williams

  Enough, Can Do

  Joy Williams (2015). “Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals”, p.178, Rowman & Littlefield

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