Joy Williams Quotes

Pearl suspected God didn't love human beings much. She suspected that what He loved most was Nothingness.

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.

Many writers today are wanderers. There is not only an unhousedness in language - how to convey, to say nothing of converge - but an unhousedness of place.

I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don't do anything with it, you lose it.

Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead fought continuously and as bitterly as vipers. Their arguments were baroque, stately and, although frequently extraordinary, never enlightening.

Have a nice remainder of the rest of your life.

What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibi lity of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes ...

Above me, billboards advertise gun shows, mobile-telephone plans and law firms that specialize in drunk-driving cases. I looked into renting a billboard recently but my application was rejected.

THE GREATEST PROSPERITY COMES TO ITS END,
DISSOLVING INTO EMPTINESS; THE MIGHTIEST
EMPIRE IS OVERTAKEN BY STUPOR AMIDST
THE FLICKER OF ITS FESTIVAL LIGHTS
-Rabindrath Tagore

it would have said.

The billboard people told me they didn't know who Rabindranath Tagore was and could not verify anything he might have thought. He was certainly foreign and his sentiments insurrectionary. As well, what he was saying wasn't advertising anything. This night I see that space I tried to claim depicts black-and-white cows painting the words EAT MORE CHICKEN on the side of a barn.

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it.

A side benefit of the new and developing technologies is that soon we won't have to feel guilty about the suffering and denigration of the animals because we will have made them up.

The Lord was living with a great colony of bats in a cave. Two boys with BB guns found the cave and killed many of the bats outright, leaving many more to die of their injuries. The boys didn't see the Lord. He didn't make His presence known to them. On the other hand, the Lord was very fond of the bats but had done nothing to save them. He was becoming harder and harder to comprehend. He liked to hang with the animals, everyone knew that, the whales and bears, the elephants and bighorn sheep and wolves. They were rather wishing He wasn't so partial to their company. Hang more in the world of men, they begged Him. But the Lord said He was lonely there.

We are saved not because we are worthy. We are saved because we are loved.

He wants to apologize but does not know for what. His life has been devoted to apologetics. It is his profession. He is concerned with both justification and remorse. He has always acted rightly, but nothing has ever come of it.

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.

Writers when they're writing live in a spooky, clamorous silence, a state somewhat like the advanced stages of prayer but without prayer's calming benefits.

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.

Pearl would smile helplessly back with the sickening feeling that she was collaborating with God. Not the God of her mother's faulty and romantic vision, but the true one. A God of barbaric and unholy appearance, with a mind uncomplimentary to human consciousness.

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.

Your silence is a little black garden. You know everything there by heart.

Words at night were feral things.

Shooting felt good. Joy consists in this, after all, the increase of one's power.

The Lord was in a den with a pack of wolves. You really are so intelligent, the Lord said, and have such glorious eyes. Why do you think you're hounded so? It's like they want to exterminate you, it's awful. Well, sometimes it's the calves and the cows, the wolves said. Oh those maddening cows, the Lord said. I have a suggestion. What if I caused you not to have a taste for them anymore? It wouldn't matter. Then it would be the deer or the elk. Have you seen the bumper stickers on the hunters' trucks - DID A WOLF GET YOUR ELK? I guess I missed that, the Lord said. Sentiment is very much against us down here, the wolves said. I'm so awfully sorry, the Lord said. Thank you for inviting us to participate in your plan anyway, the wolves said politely. The Lord did not want to appear addled, but what was the plan His sons were referring to exactly? FATHERS AND SONS

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.

Down in the kitchen, I open the refrigerator. There is nothing there but the prize steer of the county fair, rearranged in neat and mysterious packages. Daily, the cook pushes her hand into the cold. The result in uncertain. A gristly Ouija. It could be pot roast or brisket, eye of the round or sirloin tip. The steer has invaded their lives. He is everywhere. There is no room for the sisters' diet-cola or for their underwear on sizzling mornings. They have been eating him for weeks.

Did the walls of the barn start to tremble
With a glory they could not contain?
Did anyone wake with the feeling
Of peace that they could not explain?
Oh the love must have been overwhelming
As it warmed everyone in it's flow
For all of the earth is still telling
of 2000 Decembers ago.

Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough

You don't get older during the time spent in church, he told us.
He pushed a shopping cart with a few rags and a bottle of Windex in it.
We gave him a dollar.

Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly.

One writes to find words' meanings.

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.

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.

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.

So many times in a single day we glimpse a view beyond the apparent. Write those moments down. They might not speak to you at first. But eventually they might. Everybody writes too long and too much anyway, sacrificing significance for story. Truth be told, we all want to be poets.

One is always enthralled, I think, when a young writer you're just beginning to read and comprehend dies.

She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.

That's nice, isn't it?" Edith said. "That little kid is so trusting it's kind of holy, but if his trust were misplaced it would really be holy.

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.

I navigate my passage across the first monstrous intersection, where a sign announces the imminent arrival of a dessert parlor named Better Than Sex. I would like to move to the country but the boy refuses. Besides, "the country" exists only in our fantasies anymore. When I was a child, the country was where overly exuberant family pets often found themselves."
"I navigate my passage across the first monstrous intersection, where a sign announces the imminent arrival of a dessert parlor named Better Than Sex. I would like to move to the country but the boy refuses. Besides, "the country" exists only in our fantasies anymore. When I was a child, the country was where overly exuberant family pets often found themselves."
- Joy Williams from The Country

Clouds aren't as pretty as they used to be. That's a known fact.

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?

Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that reminded the lonely blackly of the darkness.

I think I had the same notion most people have, which is it's simply a town that percolates around country music. Though country-music history is deep and richly steeped throughout the city, this is a place that's been expanding musically and culturally ... People coming from Europe and Canada-there are all kinds of different cultures and different music being represented here. It continues to blossom.

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.

I can't understand why God made every tiny snowflake different and all these men the same.

A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.

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.

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.

Katherine feels that she must have learned something about marriage from being married before that is now working to her benefit. However, she doesn't know quite what it is, or how, actually, it works.

I believe in guilt. There's not enough guilt around these days for my taste.

That was the problem with public art, it risked great ridicule.

Every living thing suffers transfiguration. Yes, until the creation of Eve, Adam had fondled beasts.

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

Someone once told me a story about long term relationships. To think of them as a continent to explore. I could spend a lifetime backpacking through Africa, and I would still never know all there is to know about that continent. To stay the course, to stay intentional, to stay curious and connected - that's the heart of it. But it's so easy to lose track of the trail, to get tired, to want to give up, or to want a new adventure. It can be so easy to lose sight of the goodness and mystery within the person sitting right in front of you.

But who knows what good might come from the least of us? From the bones of old horses is made the most beautiful Prussian Blue.

It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.

The best books were those uninhabited by those who wrote them.