Time of the Child: A Novel

by Niall Williams

To mask despair against God, he chose an old tactic: retain a semblance of order, and in this way meet the greatest challenge of life, which is always nothing more nor less than how to get through another day.

Though she lived in a country with the lowest percentage of married women in the known world, in a twist she hadn’t seen coming, it came to seem that it must have been her fault. She had some lack, she thought, not to be able to get him to propose and take her into the house with his mother. She was not beautiful enough, she decided. It was a corrosive conclusion, the acid kept inside her by the cork of the unpopped question. It ate her youth and flattened her curls, leaving her with a let-down, stranded air and the tight mouth of the unchosen.

in all places far from the centre there is no standard way of being. People make it up as they go and prove their individuality by being unpredictable.

in it was the solace of invisible allies and the understanding that for the ails of the human condition medicine came not only in tablet form.

the whole history of mankind had failed the Sermon on the Mount, the bitterness of that only resolved by the understanding he came to that maybe the aspiration was more important than the realisation, and maybe Christ knew that.

an air-traffic of invisibles accompanied by prayer.

What Ronnie herself wanted was to live in that place she considered beautiful, where she could be of use, and in the paradoxical paradise of a falling-down house be free to live inside her mind. That this was a richness she had come to understand first through reading novels

In novels and stories, she had found a doorway through which there was first company, and then something more.

there is no response to match the writer’s own in the moment of creation. Anything after that, even an It’s wonderful would not be as wonderful as it was, however briefly, to the writer when the words came through them out of the invisible and onto the page. There was simply nothing that could be said that would not have fallen short. The learning of that would confirm to Ronnie the irredeemable loneliness of all creators, but more, that the only approval she would seek would be her own.

the only thing that matters in the face of grief, I am with you.

Normal is a term that has no normality: the peculiarity of every individual guarantees it.

time was invented to make measured what is not,

There were always some who, by virtue of a nature that found everything near to them worse than what was far,

The truth is always understood before your senses prove it.