David Williams > David's Quotes

“And then we had the wake. It was lovely with tears and laughter, roar and uproar. Nobody died. Well, only a little. We all died a little. But death mostly let us be. Death seemed to think there was, for us, a fate worse than it. Which left us alive in the end, and so very, very drunk.”
― David Wesley Williams, Come Again No More (forthcoming 2025)

“Good puzzle would be cross Memphis without passing a barbecue joint.”
― David Wesley Williams, Come Again No More (forthcoming 2025)

“The sun played children’s games with the clouds, but the clouds grew tired of such trifling and turned dark.

Two days out of Memphis, a sort of desperation set in aboard the Clementine. Nerves were frayed from the long journey west and patience was as short as the supply of whiskey—a cross look could get you a poke in the eye, a sarcastic remark might prompt a pot shot from one of the cheap pistols that suddenly proliferated on board. Children carried them, even. The snotnoses—armed!”
― David Wesley Williams, Everybody Knows (2023)

“He tried the crank radio, a pirate station out of Memphis. Static and guitar scratch, the straggling notes of a song about home.”
― David Wesley Williams, Everybody Knows (2023)

“Some nights, we have the road to ourselves and the radio sings only for us. We play our shows and tear-ass out. Tonight, it was this little dive bar in a town we took to calling East Motherless. But we play, no matter. We rock and then we roll. The soundcheck and the fury, the power chord and the glory. Then we load our gear into a muddy-brown Merc with a little trailer behind, and we’re off. Slinging gravel, filling sky with road.”
― David Wesley Williams, Long Gone Daddies (2013)

“So out of Arkansas came Johnny Cash, sounding like doom looked. He had a voice of deep, swaggering sadness and wanted to sing gospel, but it was train tracks and prison bars instead.”
― David Wesley Williams, Long Gone Daddies (2013)