Andrew Sean Greer Quotes & Sayings

It's so unlikely to be alive, isn't it? The right temperature, and gravity, the right atoms combining at the precise right moment, you'd think it would never happen. — Andrew Sean Greer

Lovers don't leave if there's any hope at all. — Andrew Sean Greer

How often in life do people make that awful sacrifice, that murder of possibilities? — Andrew Sean Greer

We are each the love of someone's life. — Andrew Sean Greer

What magnetic force draws us to scenes of pain, and words that wound us? You have seen this, I told myself as I marched along to that apartment. You have seen this already, you've lived through this, spare yourself — Andrew Sean Greer

When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother. — Andrew Sean Greer

Her head jerked around. "It's so unlikely to be alive, isn't it? The right temperature, and gravity, the right atoms combining at the precise moment, you'd think it would never happen." She stood looking at a painting with a hand to her cheek, then watched the cat making its way across the sofa toward the bird. "Life, it's so unlikely," she said, then turned to me again. "It's so much better than we think, isn't it? — Andrew Sean Greer

Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep. — Andrew Sean Greer

years; they had exchanged just one letter, one glance in — Andrew Sean Greer

I understand that it wasn't that you didnt want to be with me anymore, but you didn't want to be yourself anymore, the one you were with me. — Andrew Sean Greer

Women must be careful what we say to one another. We are almost all we have. — Andrew Sean Greer

Who on earth would not long to be fought for? Is this not the very heart of human existence, to be worth fighting for, worth losing everything for? — Andrew Sean Greer

I knew that not all lives are equal, that the time we live in affects the person we are, more than I had ever thought. Some have a harder chance. Some get no chance at all. With great sadness, I saw so many people born in the wrong time to be happy. — Andrew Sean Greer

No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain. — Andrew Sean Greer

To give up a marriage - someone unmarried might imagine it's like giving up a seat in a theater, or sacrificing a trick in bridge for the possibility of better, later. But it is harsher than anyone could realize: a hot invisible fire, burning pieces of hope and fantasy, and charred bits of the past. It had to go, however, if something were to be built in its place. So I stood there and gave Buzz advice, and all I could think of were the automatons we had seen at Playland, moving beautifully in the wind, and the children who were taken behind the scenes on a tour and shown, to their surprise, the vast tangle of wires and switches that would be so hard to undo, and even worse, once undone, to bring to life again. — Andrew Sean Greer

If you clenched your right hand in a fist, that would be my San Francisco, knocking on the Golden Gate. Your little finger would be sunny downtown on the bay, and your thumb would be our Ocean Beach out on the blue Pacific. They called it the Sunset ... It sat on the very edge of the continent, with fog so dense and silver you hardly ever saw a sunset in the Sunset ... — Andrew Sean Greer

For is my story really so unusual? To wake each morning as if things had gone differently
the dead come back, the lost returned, the beloved in our arms
is it really any more magic than the ordinary madness of hope? — Andrew Sean Greer

How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone. — Andrew Sean Greer

Change was not something you waited for, quietly, mutely, in a house by the ocean, nothing would ever change unless we forced it into shape. — Andrew Sean Greer

I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what — Andrew Sean Greer

It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love. — Andrew Sean Greer

A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead. — Andrew Sean Greer

With lovers, though, the end is always there. It is a death as certain as the real death, and those of us in love, as at the bedside, begin to prepare ourselves. We might say it isn't working, or I can't give you what you need, and yet a day later there he is in your arms, and who can help it? There is the good-bye, and the good-bye, and the good-bye, and which will stick? Who can ever say, this is the last? One one is true, but all of them feel true, and the tears we shed are equal every time. — Andrew Sean Greer

Grief will go
it always does
but not before it forces us to do these absurd things, and hurt ourselves, and bring on suffering, because grief, that parasite, above all else does not want to die, and only in these terrible moments it creates can it feel itself thrashing back to life. — Andrew Sean Greer

Why is it so impossible to believe: that we are as many headed as monsters, as many armed as gods, as many hearted as angels? — Andrew Sean Greer

How do you make someone love you? For the very young, there can be nothing harder in the world. You may try as hard as you like: place yourself beside them, cook their favourite food, bring them wine or sing the love songs that you know will move them. They will not move them. Nothing will move them. You will waste days interpreting the simple banalities of a phone call; months staring at their soft lips as they talk; you will waste years watching a body sitting in a chair and willing every muscle to take you across the room and do a simple thing, say a simple word, make them love you and you will not do it; you will waste long nights wondering how they cannot feel this - the urge to embrace, the snow melt in the heart when you are near them - how they can sit in that chair, or speak with those lips, or make a call and mean nothing by it, hide nothing in their hearts. Or perhaps what they hide is not what you want to see. Because surely they love someone. It simply isn't you. — Andrew Sean Greer

she began as always. "To let Mr. Michelson — Andrew Sean Greer

The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be? — Andrew Sean Greer

Here was a thing that would grow old; here was a thing that would turn beautiful and lose that beauty, that would inherit the grace but also the bad ear and flawed figure of her mother, that would smile too much and squint too often and spend the last decades of her life creaming away the wrinkles made in youth until she finally gave up and wore a collar of pears to hide a wattle; here was the ordinary sadness of the world. — Andrew Sean Greer

There is a truth that everyone knows but you. Each of us has it; no one is immune. Not a secret, not a scandal, but something simple and obvious to everyone else. It can be as simple as losing weight, or as difficult as leaving a husband. How awful, to sense that everybody knows the thing that would change your life, and yet no one is friend enough to tell you! You are left to guess, all by yourself. Until that moment comes when it reveals itself to you, and of course this revelation always comes a moment too late. — Andrew Sean Greer

It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart. — Andrew Sean Greer

The heart will hear only one sound. A "no" will pass unnoticed, and a "good-bye" will be heard only as a deferral of hope; the future is unmarred, pushed forward by events but untouched by them because the heart sees only a perfect future. The rest, as they say, is noise. There is only one sound it can hear. There is only "yes. — Andrew Sean Greer

When you were a little girl, Madam ... was this the woman you dreamed of becoming? — Andrew Sean Greer

I am sure we both loved a different man. Because a lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we've married him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled in by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. — Andrew Sean Greer

I have a randezvous with life. — Andrew Sean Greer

It's just that, you know how it is in some relationships, how one of them is a little more in love. Well, it's like that with friendships. Sometimes one of them thinks they're really close, closer than they are. And the other doesn't feel that way. — Andrew Sean Greer

Young people are inept at love; it is like being given a flying machine, and you leap inside, ready to set off as you've always dreamed, yet you don't have the first notion of how to make it start, much less how to make it move. — Andrew Sean Greer

Some accidental frequency in the siren had lit a gene like a flare in their rib cages, freeing them - for what greater freedom could there be than to forget your home? — Andrew Sean Greer

Just one small thing had changed, such a small thing really. What difference could it make, the era in which we are born? — Andrew Sean Greer

Meaning his stuffed bear who was as real to him as his mother or me. Or else as imaginary. — Andrew Sean Greer

We think we know the ones we love, and though we should not be surprised to find that we don't, it is heartbreak nonetheless. It is the hardest kind of knowledge, not just about another but about ourselves. To see our lives as a fiction we have written and believed. Silence and lies. The sensation I felt that evening
that I did not know my Holland, did not know myself, that it was perhaps impossible to know a single soul on earth
it was a fearful loneliness. — Andrew Sean Greer

Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul. — Andrew Sean Greer

Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why. — Andrew Sean Greer

Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life? — Andrew Sean Greer

Margaret herself hadn't known her body was a parish bell tolling at every heartbreak she heard of, and that night with Pete calmly sitting on the edge of her favorite chair, invading her private room with words this room was sealed from, she felt it just as a bell would. It struck her right inside, until her bronze skin rang out the news. Not of Pete's story, which had not even made him cry, but some other story she'd been trying not to tell herself. So she sat stiffly there and wept, clanging and clanging like a thing that tested its own breaking. — Andrew Sean Greer

The impossible happens once to each of us — Andrew Sean Greer

The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person. — Andrew Sean Greer

It is almost another kind of love, being loved. It is the same heat but from another room; it is the same sound but from a high window ... — Andrew Sean Greer

We think we know people, and dismiss the scenes as aberrations, as the lightning strikes of madness, but surely we are wrong. Surely these are the truest moments of their lives. — Andrew Sean Greer

It may be a childish torment, but we do not get to choose our demons. — Andrew Sean Greer

People always say the greatest love story in the world is Romeo and Juliet. I don't know. At fourteen, at seventeen, I remember, it takes over your whole life." Alice was worked up now, her face flushed and alive, her hands cutting through the night-blooming air. "You think about nobody, nothing else, you don't eat or sleep, you just think about this ... it's overwhelming. I know, I remember. But is it love? Like how you have cheap brandy when you're young and you think it's marvelous, just so elegant, and you don't know, you don't know anything ... because, you've never tasted anything better. You're fourteen."
It was no time for lying. "I think it's love"
You do?"
I think maybe it's the only true love."
She was about to say something, and stopped herself. I'd surprised her, I suppose. "How sad if you're right," she said, closing her eyes for a moment. "Because we never end up with them. How sad and stupid if that's how it works. — Andrew Sean Greer

We kept each other's stare a long time, for we had each done a startling thing, dodged time for an instant - which is the only definition of happiness I know. — Andrew Sean Greer

Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory. — Andrew Sean Greer

We are deaf to what life brings us. — Andrew Sean Greer

Here is a writer possessing the greatest talent: that of fully inhabiting the lives of others. Spargo conjures up these two as no one has done before. Scott and Zelda become, in Spargo's remarkable novel, not people of history but of literature, and reminders of what we fight for, what we fail to win, and the beauty that abides between. A marvel of a book. — Andrew Sean Greer

WHY IS IT impossible to be a woman? Men will never understand, men who are always themselves, day after day, shouting opinions and drinking freely and flirting and whoring and weeping and being forgiven for it all. When has a woman ever been forgiven? Can you even imagine it? For I have seen the plane of being, and nowhere upon it is the woman tracing her life as she always dreamed of it. Always there are the boundaries, the rules, the questions - wouldn't you prefer to be back home, little lady? - that break the spell of living. What a fantasy to live within that spell, the enchantment of speaking one's mind, and doing one's will, and waking in the bed of one's choosing. — Andrew Sean Greer

It turns out that you don't end up with the people you love; by definition, you end up with the ones who stay. — Andrew Sean Greer

For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research. — Andrew Sean Greer

A burned-out face trying not to break open at the horror he has seen. The way they look at you, those poor broken men; it's not empty or terrified at all. It's as if you were the first sign of life, of beauty, after a long, long winter. Does love always form, like a pearl, around these hardened bits of life? — Andrew Sean Greer

We have no heart at seventeen. We think we do; we think we have been cursed with a holy, bloated thing that twitches at the name we adore, but it is not a heart because though it will forfeit anything in the world-the mind, the body, the future, even the last lonely hour it has-it will not sacrifice itself. — Andrew Sean Greer

As the Japanese will tell you, one can train a rose to grow through anything, to grow through a nautilus even, but it must be done with tenderness. — Andrew Sean Greer

There is nothing like that for the boys who did not go to war; they were not soldiers, and did not die. They are burned out of history, for nothing blazes quite as hot as shame. There are no bills in circulation. But I have signed their names to this story. I have signed all of our names.
How else will we be remembered? — Andrew Sean Greer

I am sure we each loved a different man. Because a lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we've married him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled in by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he is dead. — Andrew Sean Greer

You cannot go around in grief and panic every day; people will not let you, they will coax you with tea and tell you to move on, bake cakes and paint walls. [ ... ] So what you do is you let them coax you. You bake the cake and paint the wall and smile; you buy a new freezer as if you now had a plan for the future. And secretly
in the early morning
you sew a pocket in your skin. At the hollow of your throat. So that every time you smile, or nod your head at a teacher meeting, or bend over to pick up a fallen spoon, it presses and pricks and stings and you know you've not moved on. You never even planned to. — Andrew Sean Greer

So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman. — Andrew Sean Greer

I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do, but either walk around or read a book or work on your book. — Andrew Sean Greer

And finally: Who are we when we're not ourselves? — Andrew Sean Greer

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding. — Andrew Sean Greer