“Love ... was part imagination, its web spun as much in the dark lonely separated evenings of longing as in the shared times together.”
― Niall Williams, quote from Four Letters of Love
“..Window panes that rattled under the lash of the wind for two months on end, rain that leaked beneath the doors, her husband out and drinking, electricity cut off and the radio shut down, the boredom, the quiet and incredible loneliness - Margaret Looney would remember when she first discovered love and wonder at how immense it must have been to be lasting so long.”
― Niall Williams, quote from Four Letters of Love
“The skies we slept under were too uncertain for forecasts. They came and went on the moody gusts of the Atlantic, bringing half a dozen weathers in an afternoon and playing all four movements of a wind symphony, allegro, andante, scherzo and adagio on the broken backs of white waves.”
― Niall Williams, quote from Four Letters of Love
“She flashed upon his life with an electric energy, shattering every day's effort at work and leaving a kind of glimmering burning feeling all day and night around the edges of his heart.”
― Niall Williams, quote from Four Letters of Love
“There were families everywhere, loose loud chains of them wandering down the streets, in and out of shops, young children with rings of ice-cream round their mouths and saddles of freckles across their noses.”
― Niall Williams, quote from Four Letters of Love
“In love everything changes, and continues changing all the time. There is no stillness, no stopped clock of the heart in which the moment of happiness holds forever, but only the constant whirring forward motion of desire and need, rising and falling, falling and rising, full of doubts then certainties that moment by moment change and become doubts again.”
― Niall Williams, quote from Four Letters of Love
“They had no children. They spent money on the house, and for five years it went through an elaborate series of new looks each one more ambitiously designed than the next, until to scratch the wall in the bathroom was to reveal a rainbow of pastel shades in which could be read my mother's hopeless biannual efforts to sustain her domestic dream.”
― Niall Williams, quote from Four Letters of Love
“My father's hand found the door locked. His calls to my mother went unanswered. He beat with his fists and called out her name, again and again, tears burning from his eyes. By the time I had come in the front door, the cake in my arms, he had broken his way in and discovered she was dead.”
― Niall Williams, quote from Four Letters of Love
“Compelling and poetic, Four Letters of Love spirits the reader away to a magical, mist-clad coastline, inhabited by a passionate people, and unfurls like some epic poem which has been handed down in song, generation to generation. Half fable, half tragic realism, its musical rhythm is unforgettable”
― Niall Williams, quote from Four Letters of Love
Niall Williams
Born place: Dublin, Ireland
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“He smacked the heel of his hand against his forhead, as if that could knock the mental picture out of his head. Hell, he though irritably, he didn't want to knock the image just out of his head. He wanted to send it clear across the room and out the window.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from Brighter Than the Sun
“How had she ended up like this, imprisoned in the role of harridan? Once upon a time, her brash manner had been a mere posture - a convenient and amusing way for an insecure teenage bride, newly arrived in America, to disguise her crippling shyness. People had actually enjoyed her vituperation back then, encouraged it and celebrated it. She had carved out a minor distinction for herself as a 'character': the cute little English girl with the chutzpah and the longshoreman's mouth. 'Get Audrey in here,' they used to cry whenever someone was being an ass. 'Audrey'll take him down a peg or two.'
But somewhere along the way, when she hadn't been paying attention, her temper had ceased to be a beguiling party at that could be switched on and off at will. It had begun to express authentic resentments: boredom with motherhood, fury at her husband's philandering, despair at the pettiness of her domestic fate. She hadn't noticed the change at first. Like an old lady who persists in wearing the Jungle Red lipstick of her glory days, she had gone on for a long time, fondly believing that the stratagems of her youth were just as appealing as they had ever been. By the time she woke up and discovered that people had taken to making faces at her behind her back - that she was no longer a sexy young woman with a charmingly short fuse but a middle-aged termagant - it was too late. Her anger had become a part of her. It was a knotted thicket in her gut, too dense to be cut down and too deeply entrenched in the loamy soil of her disappointments to be uprooted.”
― Zoë Heller, quote from The Believers
“I love eating chicken with my bare hands. It makes me want to snarl at people, even more than usual.”
― Jeri Smith-Ready, quote from Requiem for the Devil
“...do you have someone you can stay with? Hell, stay with your mother. The Pentagon doesn’t have the security system she’s got.”
I really would rather die. “I’m not putting my mother in the path of a serial killer. Thanks for the thought.”
“God help the serial killer who tackles your mother,” Riordan muttered.”
― Josh Lanyon, quote from Fatal Shadows
“When you knew I was coming?” I said. “I wrote it when I knew I wanted to speak. I went to my hill and spoke to my grandfathers. They gave me that song. They gave it to me in the wind. They said I had too much anger to speak. They told me that anger is only for the one who speaks. It never opens the heart of one who listens.”
― Kent Nerburn, quote from Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder
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The AbortionBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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