The Folded Leaf Quotes

“But to live in the world at all is to be committed to some kind of a journey.”
― William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf

“With that one remark the distance which had always been between them stretched out and became a vast tract, a desert country.”
― William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf

“But to live in the world at all is to be committed to some kind of a journey... On a turning earth, in a mechanically revolving universe, there is no place to stand still. Neither the destination nor the point of departure are important. People often find themselves midway on a journey they had no intention of taking and that began they are not exactly sure where.”
― William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf

“Something had burst inside him, something more important than any organ, and there was a flowing which was like blood. Though he kept on breathing and his heart after awhile pounded less violently, there it was all the same, an underground river which went on and on and was bound to keep on like that for years probably, never stopping, never once running dry.”
― William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf

“The light dimmed and went out, and I remember thinking then with surprise that this familiar thing, this comforting complete darkness that I had known every night of my life, was death.”
― William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf

“Music never comes unbidden to the mind. It is a beautiful private language, independent of words, made up of association and memory. And no one listens to it.”
― William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf

“On the desk, surrounded by books and papers, was a blue bowl filled with ridiculous, long-stemmed plants grown all out of proportion and fourteen or fifteen inches tall. The old age of flowers (these were violets, mostly) is as strange and as pathetic as the old age of people.”
― William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf

“They spoke with the natural, easy assurance of people who know that they are, socially speaking, the best; and that everywhere they go the best of everything will be reserved as a matter of course for them.”
― William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf

“Time is probably no more unkind to sporting characters than it is to other people, but physical decay unsustained by respectability is somehow more noticeable.”
― William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf

“Lynch’s hand sought his striped bow tie, lest it be at an angle,”
― William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf

“The great, the universal problem is how to be always on a journey and yet see what you would see if it were only possible for you to stay home: a black cat in a garden, moving though iris blades behind a lilac bush. How to keep sufficiently detached and quiet inside so that when the cat in one spring reaches the top of the garden wall, turns down again, and disappears, you will see and remember it, and not be absorbed in that moment in the dryness of your hands.”
― William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf

“The desert is the natural dwelling place not only of Arabs and Indians but also of people who can't speak when they want to and of those others who, like Lymie Peters, have nothing more to say, people who have stopped justifying and explaining, stopped trying to account for themselves or their actions, stopped hoping that someone will come along and love them and so make sense of their lives.”
― William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf