Time of the Child Quotes

“you can correct me if I am wrong, is that for the accomplishment of what was intended, God is required to have a patience not otherwise imaginable by human beings, except vaguely by the word unearthly. My understanding is He sees and knows, and foresaw and foreknew, all our errors, all our wrong turns and catastrophes, and still loved us. And still loved us. Not because but despite. He has already seen that child and seen to it that she was brought to this house, and seen to it that my daughter would love her. He has already read this story, and knows how it goes, because he knows there are humans in it. And that’s where His patience has to come in. Because. Because in some part of Him, in some part of Him He remembers that He made us with the intention of love. And that no matter how many times, no matter how many ways we find to defeat that intention, it is still there. Still there. And beats any regulation, ruling, decree or code, is beyond all jurisdiction or legislation made by man, because it pre-dates all, didn’t even need to be commanded. Love. That’s my understanding. And that’s what’s in that kitchen. That’s what came to this house the day of the fair. And that’s what I am going to try and keep alive. You can go ahead now and tell me where I’ve gone wrong. Father.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“There might have been an invisible force pressing down on each day, but rain and religion had left the people a twinned philosophy of offering it up and getting on with it.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“How was she still awake, still standing, he wondered, and not for the first time considered that God's first mistake was starting with a man.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child

“Because one day you or I may be in the same place that Tom is now, and at that time what we will be hoping, what we will be praying for is that there is still enough decency in the world to allow us every last chance to sleep in our own bed, until that is impossible and we need professional care. But until then, we will be hoping, we will be praying, there will be someone who still sees us as people not patients. That’s why.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“You could learn more from women than just putting down the toilet seat.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“He did not know if he believed in the Holy Spirit, but if asked he would have said that night was the closest he came, that there was an otherness, a largeness apparent and invisible there at the same time, something that did not exist in the textbooks but was the same thing that had been since the beginning, which was that there was something more than the perimeter of flesh, something else and beyond explanation, and which was felt in that part of us that, for lack of any better, was given the word soul. In the growing warmth of the congregation at Communion, the”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“in his last year, claimed that the purpose of ageing was to grow into your soul, the one you have been carrying all along.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“But storytellers skip the everyday, mistaking the ordinary for the dull, seizing on the sensational and leaving out the habitual that is in fact the fabric of life.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child

“I’ll see you in the morning,’ her father said, and raised a palm a few inches in a compendium gesture of Goodnight farewell thank you I’m sorry and I love you.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“He did not know if he believed in the Holy Spirit, but if asked he would have said that night was the closest he came, that there was an otherness, a largeness apparent and invisible there at the same time, something that did not exist in the textbooks but was the same thing that had been since the beginning, which was that there was something more than the perimeter of flesh, something else and beyond explanation, and which was felt in that part of us that, for lack of any better, was given the word soul.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“he succumbed to the seasonal sentiment that was chronic but harmless: it was possible to believe in human goodness.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“queueing at the counter was only for Protestants.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“He drove on, travelling in that inner country where the body is stationary, but the mind moves faster than the wheels.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“Like all household arrangements, it was made up as they went along, and like all such escaped the judgement of right and wrong by the oldest alibi, family.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“The thing she put you in mind of was a paper kite, with thin light struts and a flutter ribbon of nerves that spun wild in the smallest breeze. She was not built for big wind, and soon enough the buffeting of life on the western edge of a wet nowhere loosened the struts and undid the glue that kept all in place.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“history long since eaten by rain and dressed by a verdant moss so vigorous as to seem a cemetery vegetable.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“She looked at life with such a direct gaze that God Himself would be shy,”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“Only through the birth of a child”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“we will be praying”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“The Country Girls,”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“How was she still awake, still standing he wondered, and not for the first time considered that God's first mistake was starting with a man.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child

“challenge of life was to accept that the world is a place of pain, And yet live. Yet live, Jack.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“He had been there long enough to have treated most of their fathers and mothers, many grandfathers and grandmothers too, and recognise ailments that were like artefacts passed down the family, inarguable proofs of the theory that since human beings first stood upright, nothing was ever really cured.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child

“the sky all the time evidencing the existence of time and the mercy of creation by a thin but constant lightening,”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“in a boy’s way burnishing the chore to adventure.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“if a body could exhaust itself in living, so could a heart.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“understanding he came to that maybe the aspiration was more important than the realisation,”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“our souls were only waiting for us to put our bodies on the hanger.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“Breaffy had a grunt for welcome, as though he was only ill because the doctor was there.”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel

“The tenderness in the nocturne gave the impression of a naked human heart,”
― Niall Williams, Time of the Child: A Novel