Top 35 Adam Haslett Quotes

#1. Kind of gay? I wanted to say. Do you have any notion how many homosexuals sweated their ass off on the dance floor to make this soaring bit of derivative trash possible? How many died of AIDS, OD'd, or went broke on the way to that girl from Texas cutting a deal...

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #44630
#2. This is the thing I have discovered: Michael's being gone doesn't mean we stop trying to save him. The strain is less but it doesn't vanish. It becomes part of our bewilderment, a kind of activity without motive, which provides its own strange continuity.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #101001
#3. But holding Michael had always been like holding a little person, who knew that his feeding would end, who knew that if you were picked up you would be put down, that the comfort came but also went.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #106134
#4. That is much of what I think the writer's job is - to slow people down. To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive. Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #134898
#5. It was one of those youthful promises that you make to yourself and keep long after you stop recognizing what you are doing, or how it is distorting your life.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #185341
#6. We live among the dead until we join them,

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #227001
#7. I had never understood before the invisibility of a human. How what we take to be a person is in fact a spirit we can never see.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #235157
#8. Boredom is easy. Which is why sadness hides there so readily. But don't be fooled for long. Dying of boredom. There's reason behind that idiom. It'll kill you sure enough.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #247339
#9. This street-this whole town-was so familiar that I looked straight through it, as if it were no longer a place unto itself but merely an opening onto the past.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #260232
#10. He experienced a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person's unknowable pain. More than any landscape, this place felt like home.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #289956
#11. My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #580348
#12. It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #612256
#13. I hadn't expected much from the place, but I hadn't realized how ugly it would be, either. We

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #713160
#14. Anywhere people lived memory collected like sediment on the bed of a river, dropping from the flow of time to become fixed in the places time ran over

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #745002
#15. Sound systems are what turn cars into escape vehicles, even if you've got nowhere to go.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #764718
#16. ...even Michael, who never stopped trying to want what we wanted for him. How could he? We're not individuals. We're haunted by the living as well as the dead.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #826653
#17. Discovery is the joy.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #850316
#18. The present had somehow ceased to be an emergency.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #872801
#19. he'd use both hands to try to pry my thumb

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #876590
#20. As I see it, my job as a writer isn't to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #964925
#21. The light in that room was a kind of malpractice.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1126565
#22. I'm the only one who doesn't always want answers.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1218434
#23. That's what Proust calls it. On those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. That's the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you're alive - the backward ache. That's what music is.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1272880
#24. A shield. That's what the memories were, the ones that had risen in her with such force of late. A barricade thrown up against the depredations of the present.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1397488
#25. We ward off love because it presents itself to us as a demand: to acknowledge another person's needs, and thus our own; to glimpse their mortality, and thus ours. We each have our own means of achieving this avoidance.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1414913
#26. It struck me then, for the first time, how unethical anxiety is, how it voids the reality of other people by conscripting them as palliatives for your own fear.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1463332
#27. The monster you lie with is your own. The struggle is endlessly private. I thought it was over. That one night the beast at my back would squeeze more tightly and I would cease breathing. What remained of me hoped for it.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1554487
#28. There's something illiberal about the way infants are thrust into the hands of people who have no idea what they're doing, who can only experiment.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1580716
#29. There was just the sensation of it. A

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1629324
#30. We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings. If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we've chosen to govern ourselves.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1661712
#31. Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1672306
#32. It's easy to make too much of fathers, I want to say. A

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1733799
#33. ...I did what most kids do when their world feels destroyed. I tried to care less about what remained...It was untrue, of course.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1753740
#34. If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1785346
#35. He's in that larva stage, the damp, pained shedding of the child's body. This is what boarding school is for. To store them away during years like this, so they can suffer without the embarrassment of their parents watching.

Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quotes #1869913

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