22
" It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness. "
― Niall Williams , This Is Happiness
28
" There was the world of children, twisting, turning, being sat, leg-dangling, Stop that, turning, staring fresh-faced and wide-eyed at the mystery of an adult on their knees behind them, being pulled back, being sat again but soon sliding off, finding the pews to be perfect pirate gangways, castle ramparts, and if you slipped past the knees of just one you could walk along the kneelers, and by an unwritten statute of Church law be beyond the reach of reprimand, until you remembered there was chocolate at stake. "
― Niall Williams , This Is Happiness
36
" The known world was not so circumscribed then, nor knowledge equated with facts. Story was a kind of human bonding. I can’t explain it any better than that. There was telling everywhere. Because there were fewer sources of where to find out anything, there was more listening. A few did still speak of the rain, stood at gates in a drizzle, looked into the sky, made predictions inexact and individual, as if they were still versed in bird, berry or water language, and for the most part people indulged them, listened as if to a story, nodded, said “Is that so?” went away believing not a word, but to pass the story like a human currency to someone else.
The key thing to understand about Ganga was that he loved a story. He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started it without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. Story was the stuff of life, and to realise you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way. "
― Niall Williams , This Is Happiness
40
" was where you lived by the clock of your stomach, came back to the house only when you were hungry, ate whatever was put before you, and ran out again, only partly aware of the privilege of solitude and the gift of time. It was where every field had a name, where Gairdín na scoile was once a hedge school, and Páirc na mónaigh the field of the monks, monks you all but saw with your boyhood eyes when you heard that. It was also where, notwithstanding your age, there was work to be done, up on "
― Niall Williams , This Is Happiness
