Quotes by
William Maxwell |
1908-2000 , American writer
American editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and memoirist. He served as a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. Maxwell became a legendary mentor and confidant to many of the most prominent authors of his time. He was also an award-winning novelist and short story writer.
His best known work is the novel “So Long, See You Tomorrow” (1980) — about an aging man remembering a boyhood friendship he had in 1920s Illinois.
| 21 quotes | 886 visits |
Quotations
| • | Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep. 6 |
| • | His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope. 3 |
| • | I don’t know what she looked like. Most farm women of her age were reduced by hard work and frequent child-bearing to a common denominator of plainness. 3 |
| • | The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters. |
| • | 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. |
| • | 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. |
| • | If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth. |
| • | In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw. |
| • | My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding. |
| • | A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation. |
| • | Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera. |
| • | The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice. |
| • | I am the cat that walks alone. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love. |
| • | That’s what I try to do –write sentences that won’t be like sand castles. |
| • | Human thought is by no means as private as it seems, and all that you need to read somebody else’s mind is the willingness to read your own. |
| • | Marriage is what takes the giggles out of the girls. |
| • | To be up to the eyebrows in a great work of literature is such happiness. |
| • | A little remembering is all right, but too much is a disease I am terribly prone to. |
| • | It was the unexpected that happened, always. |
