Sarah Manguso Quotes & Sayings

When I was twenty-three I began seeing a psychotherapist because I couldn't bear the idea that, after the end of an affair, all our shared memories might be expunged from the mind of the other, that they might no longer exist outside my own belief they'd happened. I couldn't accept the possibility of being the only one who would remember everything about those moments as carefully as I tried to remember them. My life, which exists mostly in the memories of the people I've known, is deteriorating at the rate of physiological decay. A color, a sensation, the way someone said a single word - soon it will all be gone. In a hundred and fifty years no one alive will ever have known me. Being forgotten like that, entering that great and ongoing blank, seems more like death than death. — Sarah Manguso

Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws ... I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn't a character flaw. — Sarah Manguso

It takes time to recover from having run somewhere. But sometimes one just wants to run. Anywhere. — Sarah Manguso

Only a fire can teach you what survives a fire. No, it teaches you what can survive that fire. — Sarah Manguso

The memory and maybe the fact of every kiss start disappearing the moment the two mouths part. — Sarah Manguso

Depression is hard to describe not just because it is complex and abstract but also because it occupies the part of us capable of describing things. — Sarah Manguso

When a student surpasses my expectations, I feel proud and betrayed. — Sarah Manguso

Slowly, slowly, I accumulate sentences. I have no idea what I'm doing until suddenly it reveals itself, almost done. — Sarah Manguso

Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity. — Sarah Manguso

If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it. — Sarah Manguso

Progress takes place in the dark, when you aren't trying. — Sarah Manguso

On the page, these might look like the stones of a ruin, strewn by time and weather, but I was here. — Sarah Manguso

My students still don't know what they will never be. Their hope is so bright I can almost see it.

I used to value the truth of whether this student or that one would achieve the desired thing. I don't value that truth anymore as much as I value their untested hope. I don't care that one in two hundred of them will ever become what they feel they must become. I care only that I am able to witness their faith in what's coming next.

I no longer believe in anything other than the middle, but my students still believe in beginnings. Ask them, and they will tell you that everything is about to start in just a moment, just one more moment. — Sarah Manguso

I used to be twenty. Then I was twenty-one, twenty-two, and so on. And then I became a mother and could no longer even distinguish the difference between twenty-one and twenty-two or the difference between thirty-eight and thirty-nine. — Sarah Manguso

Difficulty becomes familiar, at least, if no less difficult. — Sarah Manguso

One must be able to empathize with a suicide yet not become one. — Sarah Manguso

Today was very full, but the problem isn't today. It's tomorrow. I'd be able to recover from today if it weren't for tomorrow. There should be extra days, buffer days, between real days. — Sarah Manguso

You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing. You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness into brightness. — Sarah Manguso

The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn't that they'll remember; it's that you'll remember. — Sarah Manguso

In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time. I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby's continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. I was the warmth and milk that was always there for him, the agent of comfort that was always there for him.

My body, my life, became the landscape of my son's life. I am no longer merely a thing living in the world; I am a world. — Sarah Manguso

The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know, — Sarah Manguso

Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self. — Sarah Manguso

My existence shrank from an arrow of light pointing into the future forever to a speck of light that was the present moment. I got better at living in that point of light, making the world into that point. I paid close attention to it. I loved it very much. — Sarah Manguso

I keep three kinds of books: those I want to read, those I want to reread, and those I want to reopen just to confirm how bad they are. — Sarah Manguso

I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both. — Sarah Manguso

I'd never have guessed which people I'd still know by now. — Sarah Manguso

One chair upon another is pornographic. Ten in a stack is aspirational. I made so many mistakes on purpose just to get them out of the way. One cannot convince another to love anything or anyone. Better than arguing is just pointing and saying Look at that. I've — Sarah Manguso

This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize. — Sarah Manguso

You can choose your friends but not your friendships. — Sarah Manguso

Nothing, nobody matters. And yet the world is full of love — Sarah Manguso

Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book's quotable passages. — Sarah Manguso

Sometimes a single sentence can be enough to fill the imagination completely. And sometimes a book's title is enough. — Sarah Manguso

I read obituaries every day to learn what sorts of lives are available to us, to see an entire life compressed into a few column inches, to fit the whole story in my eye at once. — Sarah Manguso

Some people will punish you merely for witnessing their weakness. Even if they sought you out and asked for help. Even if you helped. Especially if you helped. — Sarah Manguso

To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget.
A memorable sandwich, an unmemorable flight of stairs. A memorable bit of conversation surrounded by chatter that no one records. — Sarah Manguso

I reread my favorite books to make sure they're still perfect, but rereading them wears away at their perfection. — Sarah Manguso

Experience in itself wasn't enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I'd missed it. — Sarah Manguso

Anger conceals pain. It also conceals love. — Sarah Manguso

I wanted to remember what I could bear to remember and convince myself it was all there was. — Sarah Manguso

Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us - by taking everything. — Sarah Manguso

It isn't so much that geniuses make it look easy; it's that they make it look it fast. — Sarah Manguso

The trouble with setting goals is that you're constantly working toward what you used to want. — Sarah Manguso

Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little. — Sarah Manguso

What about those yogis who can lie down on a bed of nails, then arise, streaming blood, then stop the flow of blood from each wound individually with the power of their minds? Isn't frailty often a choice? — Sarah Manguso

Some things are so horrible they need to be hidden right after they become visible. They are too horrible to be seen except very slowly, or in very small amounts. Or they are too beautiful. — Sarah Manguso

My friend Isabel says, When you're writing even a short novel, with at least a couple of subplots, and God only knows how many characters, your brain holds the volume of it beyond the ability of your consciousness.
Of course. — Sarah Manguso

the wild velocity of motherhood, an enforced momentum forbidding contemplation. — Sarah Manguso

I don't know how I stay alive. What I do know is that there is a light, far above us, that goes out when we die,
and that in Hell there is a gray tulip that grows without any sun. It reminds me of everything I failed at,
and I water it carefully. It is all I have to remind me of you. — Sarah Manguso

There are good fathers and bad fathers, good sons and bad sons, good husbands and bad ones, but great friends are all alike. We choose them and keep them. We aren't bound to them by anything but love. — Sarah Manguso

You'll never know what your mother went through. — Sarah Manguso

I tend to forget that my measurement of time is designed to distract me from what's really happening. — Sarah Manguso

Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing. — Sarah Manguso

I've written whole books in order to avoid writing other books. — Sarah Manguso

And then I think I don't need to write anything down ever again. Nothing's gone, not really. Everything that's ever happened has left its little wound. — Sarah Manguso

Everything that happens is the last time it happens. We see things only as their own fatal brightness and there is nothing after that brightness. — Sarah Manguso

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear. — Sarah Manguso

Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do. — Sarah Manguso