William Maxwell Quotes

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.

Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.

My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.

If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.

Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera.

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).

Your reader is at least as bright as you are

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.

What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.

In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.

It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.

The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet

Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love.

The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.

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.

My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.

I am the cat that walks alone.

Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.

It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.

Three outstanding qualities make for success: judgement industry health. And the greatest of these is judgement.

If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.'(from "The Front and the Back Parts of the House", 1991)

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.

It is impossible to say why people put so little value on complete happiness.