Will Irby > Quotes

“We each have old stories we make new again, the things we tell and twine from time to time. Everything we constantly connect to everything else to enter some sort of cosmic passive-aggressive buzz passing over the planet. Entirely original thoughts are as rare as the diamonds born of asteroids. There's talk about talk. For each of us has his or her own amalgam of tales rife with memories, the anecdotes and yarns we spin like rag strips shorn and woven on the tapestry loom of our own histories.”
― Will Irby, An Unfinished Sunset: The Return of Irish Bly

“There was a day I awoke,” Irish says after a while, “to the rain ending abruptly. I remember the water pearling up in heavy beads along the eave of the upper story. It dripped drop by drop down from the peeling paint to banana leaves in this nook between the chimney and screened back porch below. I delighted in that sound, the drumming of the rain drops on the banana leaves. And I remember suddenly the drum-thud over the leaves overcome by the click-itty-clack of the first streetcar out on the avenue that morning. It’s funny how such an instant lodges and lingers in the mind. But I remember that instant more vividly than I do my first day at school.”
― Will Irby

“Here, before the swaying grasses in that moment magnificent, the light catches the mop-headed thatch of sable palms on the spiny little islands sprinkled about. Wide creeks mirror the sun in shimmering rivulets rippling with the tide. In the languid afternoon the light ebbs from the stark horizon and washes back, altering shadows in shades of blue over the seascape and marsh."
From Chapter 5”
― Will Irby, An Unfinished Sunset: The Return of Irish Bly

“A buzzing comes across the sky. The red biplane rolls inward across the turquoise water, over a wispy pine isle with a scattering of sailboats close by. Fishing boats make froth lines as they enter the channel below. A windjammer heads out for a sunset cruise promising a marmalade sky. The buzz hardens and bursts into an immense whirling sound above the yachts and sport fishers at the marina docks—the plane now racing its elongated shadow over the waterfront restaurants and bars. A man on bicycle coming round by the schooner wharf looks up with the whoosh of the plane already over the tall palms and roof tin, disappearing now in a muted drone down toward the Southernmost.”

From Chapter 1: An Unfinished Sunset”
― Will Irby, An Unfinished Sunset: The Return of Irish Bly

“I do intend, however, for each character to emerge whole and accessible to readers, no matter how brief his or her appearance in the book. This, of course, is a quality experienced in our wakefulness, but also in our dreams. We dream up people we have never met. Still, there is an intimacy, a deeply personal memory, a history fully known in our dream. This may later be lost to us, or remembered perhaps because our dream continues to inform us. Something happened. I want it to be like that for my readers, as if when “waking” from the book the characters are with them still. I want it to be as if these characters have been there in their lives all along. And now they know. And, there is this, too, as is said of Bly in the novel: We may each be or become characters in our own story. It’s true. There’s a sort of magic to it, but you do know that don’t you?”
― Will Irby