In Kiltumper Quotes

“The afternoon light is dying very beautifully. I think if I was given only one hour on earth, I might choose this one. It is a threshold time, almost between worlds it seems to me, and where I feel at home.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“It’s undeniable there is some virtuous feeling after planting trees, and I am not cynical enough to deride it.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“Every writer is alone with their work, always. Every writer, if they are at all truthful, knows that their work fails the standard of their own imagination, but they must keep trying.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“I think I read somewhere that a pheasant, though wild, will remember everywhere that food was found, and what’s more, what’s too astonishing not to be believed, that memory passes from one generation to the next.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“From New York, our daughter sends a message: Stop using those teabags.

She attaches an article from the UK’s Independent that says 96 per cent of teabags contain polypropylene.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“An apologetic air will help nothing.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“When I came in through the open cabin, the garden was bathed in such generous light that my feeling echoed the words of Henry Mitchell: ‘Almost any garden, if you see it at just the right moment, can be confused with paradise’.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“The defeats of August. ‘Wherever humans garden magnificently, there are magnificent heartbreaks.’ Henry Mitchell.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“That the climate is changing is a fact that anyone who works with soil and plants knows.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“Hay is a hopeful kind of thing; it is captured sunlight really, the smell of it sweet and deep and ancient.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“There will be plenty of dark and wet days ahead for rumination and philosophy.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“Does one year’s spring and summer garden vanish in memory as the next one comes? Is the garden always just this one, in front of you, right now?”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“Now I want to be careful here not to write with a glory-pen.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“I have been spending some portion of the morning thinking about the garden as the living physical expression of the idea of the sacred, and maybe as close as we can get to that on earth. This is an ancient perspective, and in many religions, but is perhaps not an idea for these times, and I have been cautiously trying to figure out just what it is that I believe. It's a complex thought with many side roads, and I have lost my way. But something of that travelling is in my head when I look up this evening and see the light silvering the eastern side of the weeping pear tree.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“This evening I write down the question that came to me while cold-fingered on the ground this afternoon: ‘What does this piece of ground we call a garden require of us?’

That we are here for it, and not vice versa, is the turn my thinking has taken.

A garden has no existence without a gardener.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“This evening I write down the question that came to me while cold-fingered on the ground this afternoon: ‘What does this piece of ground we call a garden require of us?”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“It is one of the oddities of my nature that I feel more alone when in a congregation, and Mass in the parish church became a deeply lonely experience, so I stopped going to church when there were other people there.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“Home truths: I know no other way to write other than the personal way. And it is always about love.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“There are some privileges in remoteness. One of which is you can wear anything, and act anyhow. You might as well enjoy it,”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“Today the birds are remarkably alive with song. There is a telling in it, full-throated, urgent.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“Think how terrible it would be if you stepped outside, looked around and concluded: nothing needs doing, the garden is perfect. It would be the end of the relationship, and by extension our living with and on the planet.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“Home is where you dig.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“It is both a joy and a woe that in truth no garden should once Eden is ever actually done.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“I stand for what I stand’ on is another quote of Wendell Berry’s.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“As Chris has said, it was from cuttings that all gardens here were made. They are borrowed gardens, all stitched together into the fabric of here, is how I think of it.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

“What I have come to, think, is in the origins of the word itself. In the guard that is in garden, in the sense of an enclosure, and, importantly, something protected. This, more than the idea of cultivation, is what seems central to me these days. In this enclosed space in Kiltumper, we will protect and nourish what is here.

This is what we are doing when we say we are gardening.”
― Niall Williams, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden