I know what the river is like at night. I know how it tongues the dark and swallows the rain and how it never ever sleeps. I know how it sings in its chains, how steadily it backstrokes into eternity, how if you stand beside it in the deeps of its throat it seems to be saying, saying, saying, only what you cannot tell.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
It's because people are so perishable. That's the thing. Because for everyone you meet there is a last moment, there will be a last moment when your hand slips from theirs, and everything ripples outward from that, the last firmness of a hand in yours that every moment after becomes a little less firm until you look down at your own hand and try to imagine just what it felt like before their hand slipped away. And you cannot. You cannot feel them. And then you cannot quite see them, there's blurry bits, like you're looking through this watery haze, and you're fighting to see, you're fighting to hold on, but they are perishing right before your eyes, and right before your eyes they are becoming that bit more ghost.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
Raptures could be little or large, could come one after the other in a torrent, or singly and separated by long dullness. For him life was a constant drama of seeing and blindness, but, when seeing, the world would suddenly seem to him laden.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
in that largeness of heart, that capacity for feeling and desire and passion, there's some kind of holiness.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
So the truth is he didn't fall in love either, he fell into Faith
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
Some people are just that good, they have this soldier-saint part of them intact and it takes your breath because you keep forgetting human beings can sometimes be paragons.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
'I'll go.' But he doesn't go. He uses the future not the present tense
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
Beside the river are two things you never forget, that the moment you look at a river that moment has already passed, and that everything is on its way somewhere else.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
How do you capture someone who was always slipping away?
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
He cried as if crying was a language he alone knew and in it there was something urgent he needed to say.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
He just cried on, this hopeless hard retching as if the tears were shards and each one cut as it came out.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
here's Love and Death in the same breath
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it is definitely a Thing with Claws.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
He's got all that mind, all that inner country he keeps going around in, mines and craters, caverns and dead ends.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
My father bore a burden of impossible ambition. He wanted all things to be better than they were, beginning with himself and ending with this world. Maybe this was because he was a poet. Maybe all poets are doomed to disappointment.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain