Will Willingham Quotes

He harbored a hidden inclination toward poetry but in the hard boiled world of adjusting, reading a sonnet seemed like something that could get a guy killed. It was perfect, Ben had told him. Like a book with a compartment cut out of the pages to hide a flask of whiskey, this one also let a guy hide a secret vice: the cover was bound upside down. So he could read the book, and if anyone saw him, it would look like he was posing.

Plausible deniability.

The question is what story do you need to tell, in order to give notice to that thing with fangs that keeps chewing through your insides.

Will asked the same questions as many times as he'd read the verse. What did Keats want to do, why would it take so many years, and what the hell ever got done just because a guy decided to overwhelm himself in poetry called by an old fashioned word?

Keats, Mr. Phillips? Am I to believe you were on my roof reading John Keats?

In fact, Barbara's biggest secret was Will.

The most simple and mundane things can take on deep and memorable dimensions depending on where we are, or with whom, or any number of things.

Poetry could surely slow a guy down.

There is only you: there is no one else on the telephone: No one else is on the air to whisper:
No one else but you will push the bell. No one knows if you don't; neither ships
Nor landing-fields decode the dark between: You have your eyes and what you see is.
The earth you see …

Joe Murphy's partially memorized Archibald McLeish

Rightie-tightie, Will," Joe said. "Leftie-loosie."

"Never has a more useful rhyme been written," Will said, "assuming a guy knows which is his left and right.

The thing people don't always want to realize is that stories have great power whether they get told or not.

Look, Mr. Phillips. We all know you're not his son."

People had been saying that to Will about his own dad his entire life.

Some people get to keep asserting themselves even after they're gone, it seems.

Touch has a memory," Will. Your man Keats said that.

Did he, now? Will looked up.

He did. If it had fit into his poem, I think he would have said taste and smell and sound have a memory, too.

Say more.

What more is there to say? He said what I've been saying. Aesthetics matter. Place matters. Our senses remember and replay these things back to us, to our fingers, or our nostrils, or our tongues."

(Conversation between Will and Joe.)

Mr. Phillips! Are you just getting in for the night? And Lord, have mercy! Where are your pants?

Joe put his face up to the window grate.

"Well, hello there. 'Who are you? Are you nobody too?'"

Emily purred inside her cage.