William Trevor Quotes

Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That's the main content. The biggest thing in people's lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know.

Quench love, and what is left of a man's life but the folding of a few jointed bones and square inches of flesh? Who would call that life?

We are here to love. Not much else matters.

Well, my life is so centered around the people I care about, my animals, and my work.

This is the most challenging activity that humans get into, which is love. You know, where we have the sense that we can't live without love. That life has very little meaning without love.

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

You can have everything in the world and still be the loneliest man. And that is the most bitter type of loneliness, success has brought me world idolisation and millions of pounds. But it's prevented me from having the one thing we all need: A loving, ongoing relationship.

We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.

It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of the world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

You're still alive. And that means you'll love and be loved...and in the end, nothing else really matters.

Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one's native place. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is preeminently a lover of man. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant. . .

The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love, my mistress addresses a man and not a prince.

Without love we are not truly living.

Physics is not the most important thing. Love is.

The chance to love and be loved exists no matter who or where you are.

A life without love, no matter how many other things we have, is an empty, meaningless one.

Love is the ultimate theme, but it's not just for women.

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.

When we are no longer capable of love, we are no longer alive.

Life is an opportunity to contribute love in your own way.

Getting love is a very small experience. It is the experience of beggar.

Love is not some complex, mystical abstraction. It is something accessible and human that we learn through our everyday experience, as often at times of failure as in moments of ecstasy.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

When we come to the last moment of this lifetime and we look back across it, the only thing that's going to matter is 'What is the quality of our love?'