Top 60 Joy Williams Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “As you grow older, you’ll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.”

— Joy Williams

2. “Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve – hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve – not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.”

— Joy Williams

3. “One is always enthralled, I think, when a young writer you’re just beginning to read and comprehend dies.”

— Joy Williams

4. “I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don’t do anything with it, you lose it.”

— Joy Williams

5. “The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what’s being said before the writer figures out how to say it.”

— Joy Williams

6. “I can’t understand why God made every tiny snowflake different and all these men the same.”

— Joy Williams

7. “Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.”

— Joy Williams

8. “You don’t believe in Nature anymore. It’s too isolated from you. You’ve abstracted it. It’s so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life’s highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.”

— Joy Williams

9. “What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibi lity of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes...”

— Joy Williams

10. “But who knows what good might come from the least of us? From the bones of old horses is made the most beautiful Prussian Blue.”

— Joy Williams

11. “A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.”

— Joy Williams

12. “Love is further than death.”

— Joy Williams

13. “Your silence is a little black garden. You know everything there by heart.”

— Joy Williams

14. “It’s become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.”

— Joy Williams

15. “What is the difference between being not yet born and having lived, being now dead?”

— Joy Williams

16. “There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance.”

— Joy Williams

17. “Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader’s face.”

— Joy Williams

18. “Perhaps the human race had yet to be born. Perhaps it was all a deception by the government. It hadn’t happened yet. This life was nothing but the womb.”

— Joy Williams

19. “Words at night were feral things.”

— Joy Williams

20. “The woman regarded him. Her hands shook. She was really very drunk. “I know everybody in this room,” she said. “And you know what I see when I look at them? I don’t see anybody I know.”

— Joy Williams

21. “A side benefit of the new and developing technologies is that soon we won’t have to feel guilty about the suffering and denigration of the animals because we will have made them up.”

— Joy Williams

22. “You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.”

— Joy Williams

23. “She had a dream about a tattoo. This was a pleasant dream. She was walking away and she had the most beautiful tattoo. It covered her shoulders, her back, the back of her legs. It was unspeakably fine.”

— Joy Williams

24. “Writers are like eremites or anchorites – natural-born eremites or anchorites – who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place.”

— Joy Williams

25. “One of the great secrets of life is learning to live without being happy.”

— Joy Williams

26. “Memory is the resurrection. The dead move among us the living in our memory and that is the resurrection.”

— Joy Williams

27. “Down in the kitchen, I open the refrigerator. There is nothing there but the prize steer of the county fair, rearranged in neat and mysterious packages. Daily, the cook pushes her hand into the cold. The result in uncertain. A gristly Ouija. It could be pot roast or brisket, eye of the round or sirloin tip. The steer has invaded their lives. He is everywhere. There is no room for the sisters’ diet-cola or for their underwear on sizzling mornings. They have been eating him for weeks.”

— Joy Williams

28. “There was something shameful about surviving sorrow. You were corrupted. She was corrupted. She was no good anymore. She was inauthentic, apocryphal. She wanted to be a seeker and to travel further and further. But after sorrow, such traveling is not a climbing but a sinking to a depth leached of light at which you are unfit to endure. And yet you endure there.”

— Joy Williams

29. “He wants to apologize but does not know for what. His life has been devoted to apologetics. It is his profession. He is concerned with both justification and remorse. He has always acted rightly, but nothing has ever come of it.”

— Joy Williams

30. “Writers when they’re writing live in a spooky, clamorous silence, a state somewhat like the advanced stages of prayer but without prayer’s calming benefits.”

— Joy Williams

31. “Imagination only fails us in the end, when the stories we tell ourselves have to stop.”

— Joy Williams

32. “Clouds aren’t as pretty as they used to be. That’s a known fact.”

— Joy Williams

33. “You should have changed if you wanted to remain yourself but you were afraid to change.”

— Joy Williams

34. “A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough.”

— Joy Williams

35. “We are here to prepare for not being here.”

— Joy Williams

36. “That’s what Alice liked about the desert, its constant relentless conflict with itself. The desert was unexpectedly beautiful and horrible at once.”

— Joy Williams

37. “Children were quite disturbing really. It was difficult to think about children for long. They were all fickle little nihilists and one was forever being forced to protect oneself from their murderousness.”

— Joy Williams

38. “Every living thing suffers transfiguration. Yes, until the creation of Eve, Adam had fondled beasts.”

— Joy Williams

39. “There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.”

— Joy Williams

40. “So many times in a single day we glimpse a view beyond the apparent. Write those moments down. They might not speak to you at first. But eventually they might. Everybody writes too long and too much anyway, sacrificing significance for story. Truth be told, we all want to be poets.”

— Joy Williams

41. “She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.”

— Joy Williams

42. “What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.”

— Joy Williams

43. “Pearl would smile helplessly back with the sickening feeling that she was collaborating with God. Not the God of her mother’s faulty and romantic vision, but the true one. A God of barbaric and unholy appearance, with a mind uncomplimentary to human consciousness.”

— Joy Williams

44. “Many writers today are wanderers. There is not only an unhousedness in language – how to convey, to say nothing of converge – but an unhousedness of place.”

— Joy Williams

45. “Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.”

— Joy Williams

46. “Pearl suspected God didn’t love human beings much. She suspected that what He loved most was Nothingness.”

— Joy Williams

47. “I believe in guilt. There’s not enough guilt around these days for my taste.”

— Joy Williams

48. “Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly.”

— Joy Williams

49. “Silence was a thing entrusted to the animals, the girl thought. Many things that human words have harmed are restored again by the silence of animals.”

— Joy Williams

50. “We can never speak about God rationally as we speak about ordinary things, but that does not mean we should give up thinking about God. We must push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.”

— Joy Williams