William Maxwell Quotes

25 quotes in 371 categories

• If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.
• Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.
• 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…
• Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.
• 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.
• The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice,
• Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love.
• My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.
• Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera.
• In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.
• 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).
• The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet
• I am the cat that walks alone.
• 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…
• Your reader is at least as bright as you are
• Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan…
• 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…
• 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…
• It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.
• It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.

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