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 | 1,568 visits |
Quotations
| • | Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep. 7 |
| • | 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. 4 |
| • | His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope. 4 |
| • | Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera. 2 |
| • | It was the unexpected that happened, always. 1 |
| • | A little remembering is all right, but too much is a disease I am terribly prone to. 1 |
| • | To be up to the eyebrows in a great work of literature is such happiness. 1 |
| • | Marriage is what takes the giggles out of the girls. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | That’s what I try to do –write sentences that won’t be like sand castles. 1 |
| • | Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | I am the cat that walks alone. 1 |
| • | The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice. 1 |
| • | A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation. 1 |
| • | My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding. 1 |
| • | In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw. 1 |
| • | If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
