Joy Williams > Quotes

“She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.”
― Joy Williams

“She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She'd remain outside the public sector. She'd be an anarchist, she'd travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She'd fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. She'd really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. She'd 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.”
― Joy Williams

“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

“You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.”
― Joy Williams, The Changeling

“Words at night were feral things.”
― Joy Williams, Honored Guest

“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.”
― Joy Williams, Ill Nature

“Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.”
― Joy Williams

“We are saved not because we are worthy. We are saved because we are loved.”
― Joy Williams

“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 that knows us.”
― Joy Williams

“Memory is the resurrection. The dead move among us the living in our memory and that is the resurrection.”
― Joy Williams, The Changeling

“Alice heard a woman say, 'Before I start writing I feel affectionate, interested, and frustrated. In that order. Afterwards I feel relieved, disgusted, and confused. Sometimes I don't think it's worth it.”
― Joy Williams

“Clouds aren't as pretty as they used to be. That's a known fact. ”
― Joy Williams

“Mornings, out in the garden, she would, at times, read aloud from one of her many overdue library books. Dew as radiant as angel spit glittered on the petals of Jack's roses. Jack was quite the gardener. Miriam thought she knew why her particularly favored roses. The inside of a rose does not at all correspond with its exterior beauty. If one tears off all the petals of the corolla, all that remains is a sordid-looking tuft. Roses would be right up Jack's alley, all right.

"Here's something for you, Jack," Miriam said. You'll appreciate this. Beckett describes tears as 'liquified brain.'

"God, Miriam," Jack said. "Why are you sharing that with me? Look at this day, it's a beautiful day! Stop pumping out the cesspit! Leave the cesspit alone!”
― Joy Williams

“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, Ill Nature

“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

“Pearl suspected God didn't love human beings much. She suspected that what He loved most was Nothingness.”
― Joy Williams, The Changeling

“Your silence is a little black garden. You know everything there by heart.”
― Joy Williams, Breaking and Entering

“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.”
― joy williams, Ill Nature

“Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it?”
― Joy Williams, Ill Nature

“Perhaps the human race had yet to be born. Perhaps it was all a deception by the government. It hadn't happened yet. This life was nothing but the womb.”
― Joy Williams, The Changeling

“Children were quite disturbing really. It was difficult to think about children for long. They were all fickle little nihilists and one was forever being forced to protect oneself from their murderousness.”
― Joy Williams, The Changeling

“We can never speak about God rationally as we speak about ordinary things, but that does not mean we should give up thinking about God. We must push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.”
― Joy Williams, 99 Stories of God

“He had dreamed, he had dreamed...it left him.”
― Joy Williams

“She had a dream about a tattoo. This was a pleasant dream. She was walking away and she had the most beautiful tattoo. It covered her shoulders, her back, the back of her legs. It was unspeakably fine.”
― Joy Williams, Honored Guest

“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, transcend
them. The writer does not like to follow orders, not even the orders of his own organizing intellect.”
― Joy Williams

“You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.”
― Joy Williams, Ill Nature

“What is the difference between being not yet born and having lived, being now dead?”
― Joy Williams

“That's what Alice liked about the desert, its constant relentless conflict with itself. The desert was unexpectedly beautiful and horrible at once.”
― Joy Williams

“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.”
― Joy Williams

“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.”
― Joy Williams, The Quick and the Dead