“Insecure or homicidal: the adjectives don’t bother me one bit.”
— William Giraldi
“Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can’t for long conceal the toxic spots on your character—Philip Larkin is Exhibit A—nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom.”
— William Giraldi
“For a time I hovered in that peaceful dreamland where nothing at all works properly but everything is okay.”
— William Giraldi
“I looked up fairness in the dictionary and it was not there.”
— William Giraldi
“Be sweet to one another. Stay in this beauty and brawl against the world’s power of pulling apart. Recall Old Testament terminology: covenant, sacred, sacrifice. And mind always that Adam wasn’t a schlep fruitily duped by Eve. He turned his back on God because he knew that a paradise without her was no paradise at all.”
— William Giraldi
“We know by intuition and study that great books approach a condition both above and below human — what Lesser means by “grandeur and intimacy” — and our job is to place ourselves somewhere on the continuum between those shifting poles, to welcome a gravid agitation or be willing to undergo some form of personal torsion; to have our personhood both threatened and amplified.”
— William Giraldi