J.M. Williams Quotes

I don't think a married couple can go through life without laughs together any more than they can without tears.

It is a terrible thing for an old woman to outlive her dogs.

I know all about the tyranny of women.

The mountain violets break the rocks.

Nothing human disgusts me unless it's unkind.

Walls are built up between people a hell of a damn sight faster than--broken down.

When things don’t change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them.

I met her last summer on a moonlight boat trip.

Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think.

Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.

No, truth is something desperate, an' she's got it. Believe me, it's something desperate, an' she's got it.

Young, gifted, and destitute.

Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?

Kenneth Hari does not paint portraits as they are but as he is. I feel he is hiding something from me. To board a train into his mind would give me a ride into dark adventure.

I must endure & endure & still endure.

Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental. It is not realistic.

But since I have a poet's weakness for symbols, I am using this character also as a symbol; he is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for.

Stella: And when he comes back I cry on his lap like a baby.. [she smiles to herself] Blanche: I guess that is what is meant by being in love.

We're left alone with each other. We have to creep close to each other and give gentle little nudges with our paws and our muzzles before we can slip into sleep and rest for the next day's playtime.

And so tonight we're going to make the lie true, and when that's done, I'll bring the liquor back here and we'll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into...

Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level.

Nobody knew my rose of the world but me... I had too much glory. They don't want glory like that in nobody's heart

I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic.

I wrote because I had to. I couldn't stop. There wasn't anything else I could do. If no one ever bought anything, anything I ever did, I'd still be writing. It's beyond a compulsion.

A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young an' believing.

I saw that it was all over, put away in a box like a doll no longer cared for, the magical intimacy of our childhood together

The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.

You take it for granted that I am in something that I want to get out of.

Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.

Well, honey, a shot never does a coke any harm!

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.

To hear something asks very little of us. To listen places our entire being on notice.

Perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home.

When Emily Dickinson writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” she reminds us, as the birds do, of the liberation and pragmatism of belief.

The only book worth writing is the book that threatens to kill you.

Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.

The Japanese have a word - aware - which, in my understanding is, again, that full range - both the joy and the sorrow of our life. One does not exist without the other. And I really feel that.

I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings.

I believe capitalism will eventually be replaced by a communitarian ethic where the rights and care of all beings will be taken into consideration, not just the greed of a corporate few.

Democracy is an insecure landscape.

To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Writing also requires an aching curiosity leading you to discover, uncover, what is gnawing at your bones.

Pico Iyer describes his writing as "intimate letters to a stranger," and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration.

Home is where we have a history.

The pain that we feel when we are making love with someone is that we know it will end. It's that paradoxical response of joy and suffering.

Revolution is not something outside of us, but inside us, begging for our engagement every single day.

I think about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st century. I certainly don't have the answers.

Abundance is rooted in community, not individualism. Abundance is what is before our eyes, but we cannot see when we are blinded by greed.

I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.

I feel that within the Mormon culture there is a tremendous amount of fear - of women's voices, of questioning of authority, and ultimately of our own creativity.

That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about - the patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible