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Top William Trevor Quotes

Browse top 23 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by William Trevor.

Favorite William Trevor Quotes

1. "As a writer one doesn't belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn't belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance." ~ William Trevor
2. "I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can't write unless you read." ~ William Trevor
3. "As the surface of the seashore rocks were pitted by by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath, so time made truth of what appeared to be. The days that passed, in becoming weeks, still did not disturb the surface an assumption had created. The weather of a beautiful summer continued with neither sign nor hint that credence had been misplaced. The single sandal found among the rocks became a sodden image of death; and as the keening on the pier at Kilauran traditionally marked distres brought by the sea, so did silence at Lahardane." ~ William Trevor
4. "The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we're watching, and dealing with." ~ William Trevor
5. "Shame isn't bad, her voice from somewhere else insists. Nor the humility that is its gift." ~ William Trevor
6. "Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it." ~ William Trevor
7. "She is embarrassed to be alive and no one on earth can fully console her." ~ William Trevor
8. "But you didn't lose touch with a place when it wasn't there any more, you didn't lose touch with yourself as you were when you were part of it, with your childhood, with your simplicity then." ~ William Trevor
9. "Memory in its ordinary way summoned harvested fields, and haycocks and autumn hedges, the first of the fuchsia, the last of the wild sweetpea. It brought the lowing of cattle, old donkeys resting, scampering dogs, and days and places." ~ William Trevor
10. "He should in humility have asked her why it was that he was naturally a cuckold, why two women of different temperaments and characters had been inspired to have lovers at his expense. He should be telling her, with the warmth of her body warming his, that his second wife had confessed to greater sexual pleasure when she remembered that she was deceiving him." ~ William Trevor
11. "He was an old hand at the Camp now, his hollow countenance and the intensity of his averted gaze familiar to all who came and went around him. Some had carried to other camps a description of his lanky, quiet presence, had spoken of his strangeness, his regular, lone attendance before the chapel statue. He had made no friends, but in his duties was conscientious and persevering and reliable, known for such qualities to the officers who commanded him. He had dug latrines, metalled roads, adequately performed cookhouse duties, followed instructions as to the upkeep of equipment, and was the first to volunteer when volunteers were called for. That he bore his torment with fortitude was known to no one." ~ William Trevor
12. "The flies of some other summer darkening its windowsills." ~ William Trevor
13. "They didn't mention the jealousy their love of each other had bred in him, that had flourished into deviousness and cruelty. The pain the day had brought would not easily pass, both were aware of that. And yet it had to be, since it was part of what there was." ~ William Trevor
14. "Her tranquillity is their astonishment. For that they come, to be amazed again that such peace is there: all they have heard, and still hear now, does not record it. Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel." ~ William Trevor
15. "The past has no belongings. The past does not obligingly absorb what is not wanted." ~ William Trevor
16. "I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither." ~ William Trevor
17. "He traveled in order to come home." ~ William Trevor
18. "The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction." ~ William Trevor
19. "Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child." ~ William Trevor
20. "All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife's response that came - as if in compensation for too little said before - when he wondered why his wandering had led him back to these old battlefields: in his sixty-ninth year he was establishing his survivor's status." ~ William Trevor
21. "People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone." ~ William Trevor
22. "People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing." ~ William Trevor
23. "By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people." ~ William Trevor

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William Trevor Quotes
William Trevor Quotes
William Trevor Quotes

Today's Quote

There was a soldier in the next room living with his wife and he would soon be going over there to protect me from Hitler so I snapped the radio off and then heard his wife say, "you shouldn't have done that." and the soldier said, "FUCK THAT GUY!" which I thought was a very nice thing for him to tell his wife to do. of course, she never did."
Author: Charles Bukowski

What Did William Trevor Talk About?

Here
Wit
Thin
Hen
Lit
Place
Ally
Ear
Con
Per
Ought
Old
She
Use
Ring
Came
Does
Brought
Fiction
Sin
Side
Cause
Win

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