Veronica

“The evenings that fell then were like embroidered cloths, warm and blue before the stars came out, a living embodiment of the soft permissive comfort in the sound May. Say it and you sound the evening coming down over Faha and the fields about, the cattle standing in them and the river behind the street wearing the navy sky like a favoured scarf. May. A sound that comes around you. A sound that has your mother in it.”
― Niall Williams, History of the Rain

“Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people’s conversation. One has for one’s raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“Her mind was like a bookcase whose shelves had been pulled away, leaving the books pell-mell. All the stories of her life were in there, only confounded one into the other.”
― Niall Williams, This Is Happiness

“There is pleasure in watching the sophistries of mankind, his decisions made and unmade like the swirl of a mill-race, causation sweeping him forward from act to act while his reason dances on the surface of action like a pattern of foam. Yes, and the accumulations of human reason, she thought, the proofs we all assent to, the truths established beyond shadow of doubt, these are like the stale crusts of foam that lie along the river-bank and look solid enough, till a cloudburst further up the valley sends down a force of water that breaks them up and sweeps them away.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them