Top 59 Garth Greenwell Quotes

#1. There are lots of big books that have gay characters - or, more commonly, a gay character - in secondary roles, but seldom are their lives, and especially their sexual lives, on center stage.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #30378
#2. I think history is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #75918
#3. Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #100824
#4. I think one reason I'm drawn to expansive syntax is that arias are so often exercises in extending language as a means of intensifying feeling.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #263132
#5. Bulgarian phrase zryala vuzrast, ripe age, which they use for the period before one is truly old. She

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #295769
#6. What tale of the two years did the sight of me tell?

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #302513
#7. though I thought of him often, though he appeared in dreams from which I woke more excited than I was by anything in my waking life, I didn't regret what I had done. I had missed him, but more than missing him I had been relieved that he was gone.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #303562
#8. I do think that the sense of being opposed to the present moment, that sense of the rub of history, invigorates the writing I find most exciting, and maybe precisely in being equally allegiant to an inward fineness of sensibility and an outward-facing rigor of protest or critique.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #304782
#9. As I walked along that path,

I felt drawn from myself, elated,

struck stupidly good for a moment

by the extravagant beauty of the world.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #361554
#10. He stopped then, as if he realized he had gone too far, had leaned too hard on the fiction of our relationship and felt the false surface give way.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #465788
#11. Even though I don't sing any more, singing was my first education in the arts, and it's clear to me that my training as a musician also shaped me as a writer.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #505656
#12. You can't speak to him, he said, if you speak to him, if you give any sign to him at all, he will come back; he has to stop existing for you.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #521932
#13. words in a foreign language never wound us like words in the language to which we're born. But

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #556198
#14. I think it's harder to avoid reflection on those larger patterns of history or society when they so insistently call into question your right to exist.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #619277
#15. Teaching high school was my real training as a novelist: it got me out of my head, and (at least a little) out of books, and invested me in the lives of others and the world around me.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #706629
#16. ludic: cigarette

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #713385
#17. Where the novel makes use of material from my life it does so because it's aesthetically convenient, not because of any allegiance it has to any verifiable facts.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #770354
#18. I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #833047
#19. That's all care is, I thought, it's just looking at a thing long enough, why should it be a question of scale? This seemed like a hopeful thought at first, but then it's hard to look at things, or to look at them truly, and we can't look at many at once, and it's so easy to look away.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #847127
#20. I fell back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn't welcomed, even if that welcome is contrived.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #896284
#21. Love isn't just a matter of looking at someone, I think now, but also of looking with them, of facing what they face.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #941917
#22. the whole point of literature, I think, is that it's the best technology we have for communicating what another person's life feels like from the inside.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #953373
#23. Poetry never makes any money, and so there's no pressure to appeal to an audience. That makes a lot of things about being a poet difficult, but it also means freedom to write whatever you want to write, however you want to write it.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #994697
#24. My first MFA was in poetry, and it was very much part of a professional trajectory leading to life as a professor. But in my second and third years at Harvard, I realized I didn't want an academic life.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1032760
#25. The academy is an incredibly sheltered world, and I do think it's important for writers to get out from under that shelter, at least for a while, to see what the world looks like from outside it.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1037939
#26. What would it mean to do enough, I wondered, as I had wondered before about that obligation to others that sometimes seems so clear and sometimes disappears altogether, so that now we owe nothing, anything we give is too much, and now our debt is beyond all counting.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1093733
#27. Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1112068
#28. Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1116739
#29. He had always been alone, I thought, gazing at a world in which he had never found a place and that was now almost perfectly indifferent to him; he was incapable even of disturbing it, of making a sound it could be bothered to hear.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1135222
#30. But then there's something theatrical in all our embraces, I think, as we weigh our responses against those we perceive or project; always we desire too much or not enough, and compensate accordingly. I

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1139362
#31. I studied opera, and when I left conservatory I told myself I would never sing in public again.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1164981
#32. When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1197723
#33. For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1222972
#34. Whenever I go to New York I try to soak up as much live music as I can, including as many nights at the opera as I can manage.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1231556
#35. My first months in Sofia were a time of intense disorientation: I had never been to that part of the world before; I could barely speak the language; everything seemed strange to me.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1270115
#36. the poorly typed lines, the symbols and abbreviations of Internet chat that make such language seem so much like a process of decay. As

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1281066
#37. I went back to graduate school because I wanted to avoid being a professional, to try to piece together a life that would let me avoid the tenure race and full-time teaching.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1317709
#38. Sometimes we talked the whole night long, as one does only in adolescence or very early in love. I was happy, but also I felt an anxiety that gnawed at me and for which I could find no cause, that gnawed at me more deeply precisely because I could find no cause.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1350890
#39. Whatever the weather I went out and wandered, and now I wandered with K.; I introduced him to my solitude and he deepened it without disturbance.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1358550
#40. I don't think I'm qualified to answer questions about happiness. But I guess I'd say that I don't think you ever get to put to bed something like a search for order, or any other element of your sensibility, however much you'd like to.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1411040
#41. Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1419711
#42. Writing the novel felt so private to me! I think publishing a novel is quite public and exposing, and what's a little frightening to me right now is the fact that it feels so entirely opposed to the privacy that is writing.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1428326
#43. I had been sick before, of course, but this felt more than sickness, like a physical confirmation of shame.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1452635
#44. ... my mother reached over and laid her hand on my arm, saying that was true, ... and I felt something twist in me, the motion of some unthinking thing when it is gripped too hard, and I had to resist the urge to pull away.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1475369
#45. History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1475541
#46. I realized, that the life of a musician, even of a very lucky, very successful musician, wasn't really the life I wanted: I hate travel, I hate living out of suitcases, I hate the constant anxiety of being on stage.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1518934
#47. It does seem like between the groundbreaking writing of Edmund White's generation and the work of younger gay writers in their twenties and thirties there is a kind of gap.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1537914
#48. I realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1553092
#49. I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1595244
#50. but how could I explain to R., especially to him, the feeling of inevitability I had whenever Mitko appeared, as though we were in a story that had already been written.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1647394
#51. I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1679505
#52. None of us sees history fully; none of us is adequately aware of how the arrangements of the present moment foreclose the possibilities of others to fully live their only lives.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1716502
#53. Like everything else in my past he was part of the story that had led us to each other; it's a way of being in love, I think, to see the past like that.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1774344
#54. I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1781762
#55. How easily we are made to feel, I thought, and with what little foundation, with no foundation at all. At

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1790272
#56. I'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1800788
#57. I am a gay writer, absolutely. And in no way does that fact limit the reach or importance of what I write.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1859921
#58. I take pleasure as a reader in books that tease with a kind of urgency of the real, even if it's only a manufactured effect.

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1874237
#59. that I can carry on these multiple conversations, each its own window so that sometimes my screen is filled with them; and in each I have the sense of being entirely false and entirely true, like

Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell Quotes #1874244

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top