Four Letters of Love Quotes

“The skies we slept under were too uncertain for forecasts. They came and went on the moody gusts of the Atlantic, bringing half a dozen weathers in an afternoon and playing all four movements of a wind symphony, allegro, andante, scherzo and adagio on the broken backs of white waves.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“In love everything changes, and continues changing all the time. There is no stillness, no stopped clock of the heart in which the moment of happiness holds forever, but only the constant whirring forward motion of desire and need, rising and falling, falling and rising, full of doubts then certainties that moment by moment change and become doubts again.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“Love ... was part imagination, its web spun as much in the dark lonely separated evenings of longing as in the shared times together.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“She flashed upon his life with an electric energy, shattering every day's effort at work and leaving a kind of glimmering burning feeling all day and night around the edges of his heart.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“Wives create their husbands. They begin with that rough raw material, that blundering, well-meaning and handsome youthfulness they have fallen in love with, and then commence the forty years of unstinting labour it takes to make the man with whom they can live.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love: A Novel

“..Window panes that rattled under the lash of the wind for two months on end, rain that leaked beneath the doors, her husband out and drinking, electricity cut off and the radio shut down, the boredom, the quiet and incredible loneliness - Margaret Looney would remember when she first discovered love and wonder at how immense it must have been to be lasting so long.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“There were families everywhere, loose loud chains of them wandering down the streets, in and out of shops, young children with rings of ice-cream round their mouths and saddles of freckles across their noses.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“Time does not pass, pain grows.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love: A Novel

“Margaret Gore knew what love was.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“And yet, even as at last he stood right and smiled and led them off into the city where Isabel was to spend the next six years of her life, she had fortified even stronger in herself an idea of men, pale rhapsodical creatures, figures touched by God, with weak sickening bodies and musical, immortal souls.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love: A Novel

“All creatures throughout the lands easing their cares with sleep, their hearts forgetful.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love: A Novel

“Cetera per terras omnes animalia somno laxabant curas et corda oblita laborum.” Virgil.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love: A Novel

“I stood up and felt my tears fall down,”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love: A Novel

“gelid”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love: A Novel

“scumbled”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love: A Novel

“Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt, Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love: A Novel

“I had just learned the first lesson of that week’s education in art: once you begin, nothing else matters, not love, not grief, not anything.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love: A Novel

“she drank the bitterness of her misfortune in continuous glasses of vodka, with only the vaguest realisation that she was becoming a monster.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love: A Novel

“She soured like milk and abandoned music.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love: A Novel

“In the rain-sealed rooms the wind outside was louder than learning.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love: A Novel

“School subjects seemed to the on her.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love: A Novel

“When I was twelve years old god spoke to my father for the first time.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“Some things do not bear telling. I think my father knew this. I think he knew how words can sometimes flatten the deepest emotions or pin them like wild butterflies stunned out of magnificent flight, flimsiest souvenirs of what moved and coloured air like silk. Better to imagine it.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“Compelling and poetic, Four Letters of Love spirits the reader away to a magical, mist-clad coastline, inhabited by a passionate people, and unfurls like some epic poem which has been handed down in song, generation to generation. Half fable, half tragic realism, its musical rhythm is unforgettable”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“My father's hand found the door locked. His calls to my mother went unanswered. He beat with his fists and called out her name, again and again, tears burning from his eyes. By the time I had come in the front door, the cake in my arms, he had broken his way in and discovered she was dead.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“They had no children. They spent money on the house, and for five years it went through an elaborate series of new looks each one more ambitiously designed than the next, until to scratch the wall in the bathroom was to reveal a rainbow of pastel shades in which could be read my mother's hopeless biannual efforts to sustain her domestic dream.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love