“For most people, having company for more than three of four days is a serious mistake, the equivalent to sawing a large hole in the roof and leaving all the doors and windows open in the middle of winter. Out… — William Maxwell Copy Share
“There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one's parents. Death, about which so much mystery is made,is perhaps no mystery at all. But the history of one's parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and characters guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that… — William Maxwell Copy Share
It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about. — William Maxwell Copy Share Image
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… — William Maxwell Copy Share Image
If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth. — William Maxwell Copy Share Image
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… — William Maxwell Copy Share Image
“Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on… — William Maxwell Copy Share
Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep. — William Maxwell Copy Share Image
Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera. — William Maxwell Copy Share Image
The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet — William Maxwell Copy Share Image
The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice, — William Maxwell Copy Share Image
If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception. — William Maxwell Copy Share
