William Maxwell > Quotes

“What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn't be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn't be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune than anybody else, and the idea that kept recurring to me...was that I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn't have gone through and couldn't get back to the place I hadn't meant to leave. Actually, it was other way round: I hadn't gone anywhere and nothing was changed, so far as the roof over our heads was concerned, it was just that she was in the cemetery.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“They looked at me, and were so full of delight in the pleasure they were giving me that some final thread of resistance gave way and I understood not only how entirely generous they were but also that generosity might be the greatest pleasure there is.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice,”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.”
― William Maxwell

“Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.
His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it.
Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one's parents. Death, about which so much mystery is made,is perhaps no mystery at all. But the history of one's parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and characters guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that projects one small surface above the level of smooth lawn, and when you come to dig around it, it proves to be too large ever to move, though each year's frost forces it up a little higher.”
― William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It

“What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory - meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion - is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn't be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn't be crossed.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“People often ask themselves the right questions. Where they fail is in answering the questions they ask themselves, and even there they do not fail by much. A single avenue of reasoning followed to its logical conclusion would bring them straight home to the truth. But they stop just short of it, over and over again. When they have only to reach out and grasp the idea that would explain everything, they decide that the search is hopeless. The search is never hopeless. There is no haystack so large that the needle in it cannot be found. But it takes time, it takes humility and a serious reason for searching.”
― William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It

“Without the heavy set aristocratic man snoring away on his side of the bed, without the fresh-eyed child whose hair ribbon needs retying; without the conversation at meals and the hearty appetites and getting dressed for church on time; without the tears of laughter or the worry about making both ends meet, the unpaid bills, the layoffs, both seasonal and unexpected; without the toys that have to picked up lest somebody trip over them, and the seven shirts that have to be washed and ironed, one for every day in the week; without the scraped knee and the hurt feelings, the misunderstandings that need to be cleared up, the voices calling for her so that she is perpetually having to stop what she is doing and go see what they want - without all this, what have you? A mystery: How is it that she didn't realize it was going to last such a short time?”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“But to live in the world at all is to be committed to some kind of a journey.”
― William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf

“Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love.”
― William Maxwell, They Came Like Swallows

“It would have been a help if at some time Baptist preacher, resting his forearms on the pulpit and hunching his shoulders, had said People neither get what they deserve nor deserve what they get. The gentle and the trusting are trampled on. The rich man usually forces his way through the eye of the needle, and there is little or no point in putting your faith in Divine Providence. . . . On the other hand, how could any preacher, Baptist or otherwise, say this?”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Innocence is defined in dictionaries as freedom from guilt or sin, especially from lack of knowledge; purity of heart; blamelessness; guilelessness; simplicity, etc.”
― William maxwell

“Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).”
― William Maxwell

“...human thought is by no means as private as it seems, and all that you need to read somebody else's mind is the willingness to read your own.”
― William Maxwell, The Chateau

“Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn’t be crossed.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“I have liked remembering almost as much as I have liked living.”
― William Maxwell

“Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“But he was careful. He didn’t make a simple remark without rehearsing it beforehand. And he continually removed the expression from his face lest it be the wrong one, and give him away. He also avoided any strong light, such as the lamp on the kitchen table. Sometimes a weakness overcame him, his legs were unstrung, and he had to find some place to sit down, but this was easy enough to disguise. It was his voice that gave him the most trouble. It sounded false to him and not like his voice at all.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“They had stopped shouting at each other and put their faith in legal counsel. With the result that how things could be made to look was what counted, not how they actually were.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Qué cosas más extrañas e improbables lleva la marea a las costas del tiempo.”
― William Maxwell