Brian Morton Quotes & Sayings

Knowledge is always a good thing, even when it makes us unhappy — Brian Morton

What matters, finally, isn't finding the kind of person you think you should
love. What matters is finding someone you feel more alive with. — Brian Morton

Even in your smallest gestures, you express your sense of honor, if you have one. — Brian Morton

It's probably true that you're forging your own character during every minute of every day, with every decision you make, but there are some moments in which this is more clear than in others. — Brian Morton

What you are is a complicated girl with simple needs. You need your books and time to read, and you need a few friends and you need someone-not to take care of you, but to care for you. If you have all those things, you'll always be alright. — Brian Morton

People, Florence thought as she put on her shoes. What do I need them for again? — Brian Morton

Every choice we make is either a grwoth choice or a fear choice. — Brian Morton

You seize your freedom in a spirit of rebelliousness, exuberance, defiant joy. But to live that choice
over the weeks and months and years to come
requires different qualities. It requires that you turn hard, turn rigid. Because it isn't a choice that the world encourages, you have to wear a suit of armor to defend it. — Brian Morton

Take the risk that you'll end up regretting your speech, because it's better than regretting your silence. — Brian Morton

Coincidence. But the eagerness to find meaning in such coincidences is love. — Brian Morton

He disapproved of the metaphor: he wanted to tell her that one shouldn't compare one's personal unhappiness to the most horrible crime in history. — Brian Morton

You understood me; you helped me understand myself. If reading a book is a naked encounter between two people, I have known you nakedly for years. — Brian Morton

A trip to the market in the morning to buy bread, an afternoon spent reading in a cafe - nothing was routine; a strange place helped you find the poetry in everyday life. — Brian Morton

The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories. Nothing has meaning in itself: all the objects in the world would be shards of bare mute blankness, spinning wildly out of orbit, if we didn't bind them together with stories. — Brian Morton

An artist doesn't really need a great deal of experience. One heartbreak can produce many novels. But you have to have a heart that can break. — Brian Morton

He wanted to live without distractions; he wanted to focus all the life-force he had left on this last book. But now it was hard to concentrate. There was something new in his life. There was the painful distraction of desire. — Brian Morton

To sit across the table and talk with someone you love is itself a complex engagement, with an exhaustingly subtle flow of information; to go to bed with someone--to carry your conversation into the realm of the body, a realm of insecurity and fear as well as pleasure--was always fraught with the sad evidence of how difficult it is to understand another person and make yourself understood. — Brian Morton

A piece of writing is only worth doing if you're a different person at the end of the process than you were at the beginning. — Brian Morton

It isn't a bad thing to remember that you have some wildness in you, that not every inch of your soul is honorable and responsible and presentable and tamped and tamed. — Brian Morton

The river was so blue it seemed to be breathing. — Brian Morton

There are certain situations in which you can't convey what you mean. Words don't always work. — Brian Morton

What appalled Schiller about these libraries was that they featured nothing off the beaten track: no tattered paperbacks; no evidence of distinctive personal interests; no tokens of long intellectual detours passionately explored. — Brian Morton

The moments of beauty, the moments when you feel blessed, are only moments; but memory and imagination, treasuring them, can string them together ... Everything else passes away; that which you love remains. — Brian Morton

We wish for a symmetry of feeling, but we rarely get it. It is painful to be the one who loves more, and painful to be the one who loves less. — Brian Morton

His kisses were too rote; they were assembly-line kisses. She wanted complex kisses; she wanted each kiss to be a conversation. — Brian Morton

She loved to return to the world of the book, a workd in which people were willing to let go of everything in order to follow their passions. — Brian Morton

Heather resented it that this woman was his daughter. How does a writer of the most subtle, serious fiction end up with a daughter who watches Oprah? I'd be a better daughter for him than she is. — Brian Morton

Without her glasses Vivian did look a little frightening. She had tight sinewy strappy muscles and a face that was hardened and almost brutal - a face that might have been chiseled by a sculptor who had fallen out of love with the idea of beauty. — Brian Morton

So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all. — Brian Morton

The feminist girls she knew at Oberlin, her roommate among them, were the kind of people who made you feel bad for liking what you liked. Sometimes when Emily was tired or blue she liked to watch "When Harry Met Sally", or "Love Actually", or old episodes of "Friends", and at Oberlin she'd had to wait until her roommate had gone out or fallen asleep. — Brian Morton

It wasn't that she wanted to seduce him - not literally. But flirting was a pleasure, and flirting with intelligent people - male or female - was one of the supreme pleasures of life. — Brian Morton

The parasite of art, the virus of art, never ceases to gnaw awat at your brain, never ceases to torture you with the knowledge that whatever you're doing could be done more beautifully, more powerfully, more stirringly, more disturbingly, more deeply. — Brian Morton