Top 58 Robert Goolrick Quotes
#2. There was so much we had done to ourselves, so much we said in our sessions that our hearts were rent with sorrow. There is so much that happens to the human heart that is in the realm of the unthinkable, the unknowable, the unbearable. (95)
Robert Goolrick
#3. It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be.
Robert Goolrick
#4. How life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep.
Robert Goolrick
#5. Sometimes I open or close the store. I have keys. I can go in any time I want. Some days, when it's my duty to open the store, I go in at eight o'clock, just to be alone and smell all those books around me. Each one is a door. Each one is a world.
Robert Goolrick
#6. He was drowsy. "I hope, I hope in my heart, that the fire is out. It burned too hot.
Robert Goolrick
#7. Men only give you what they give you ... when they know they can't give you what you want.
Robert Goolrick
#8. Here's another thing: There are certain wounds that never heal, certain hurts that never leave you alone, like a broken bone that heals wrong and always twinges when it's about to rain.
Robert Goolrick
#9. Desire had its exaggerated and dramatic pleasures, but he was bored by the endless scenes and recantations. Love was simply the same steady heartbeat hour after hour. It bored him with its lack of event.
Robert Goolrick
#11. Somewhere in the pain there is pleasure, and that is the most awful part, perhaps. (170)
Robert Goolrick
#12. We all wanted to be somebody else. Somebody braver, or more handsome, or smarter. It's what children want. It's what you grow out of, if you're lucky. If you don't, it's a lifetime of agony.
Robert Goolrick
#13. If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.
Robert Goolrick
#14. She thought of her life, her patchwork quilt of a life, pieced together from castoff scraps of this and that; experience, knowledge, clairvoyance. None of it made any sense to her.
Robert Goolrick
#15. There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven't had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away.
Robert Goolrick
#16. In a life, in any life, bad things happen. Many good things happen, of course, we know what they are-joy, tenderness, success beauty-but some bad things happen as well. Sometimes, very bad things happen. Children sicken and die. People we love don't love us, can never love us.
Robert Goolrick
#17. I wasn't safe. I wasn't permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn't there. There was nobody home.
Robert Goolrick
#18. In times of grief, you're waiting for something to happen, but the thing you're waiting for has already taken place.
Robert Goolrick
#19. She was the beautiful, lethal, insinuating spider he had waited for all his life.
Robert Goolrick
#20. Yes. Childhood is the most dangerous place of all. If we had to live there forever, we wouldn't last very long.
Robert Goolrick
#21. Just as there was a day every spring when the women of the town, as though by some secret signal, appeared in their summer dresses before the first heat was felt, there was as well a day when winter showed the knife before the first laceration.
Robert Goolrick
#23. It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy, Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.
Robert Goolrick
#24. We tend to go on loving the things the people who loved us loved. They are invested with soul, even if the people are long dead, even if they do not turn out to be who you thought they were.
Robert Goolrick
#25. He would move from city to city as he had always done, using people, soiling them like sheets and walking away, to find fresh faces and new diversions.
Robert Goolrick
#26. You can live with hopelessness for only so long before you are, in fact, hopeless.
Robert Goolrick
#27. Play the hand you have, Antonio, that's all anybody expects. And it's a pretty good hand." "I'm
Robert Goolrick
#28. Every day there was some new tragedy, some new and inexplicable failure of the ordinary.
Robert Goolrick
#29. She had been adept at the beginning and the end of things, and now she saw that whatever pleasures life had to offer lay in the middle. She could find some peace there.
Robert Goolrick
#30. When you're young, and you head out to wonderful, everything is fresh and bright as a brand new penny, but before you get to wonderful you're going to have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, stop and take a good long look, because that may be as far as you're ever going to go.
Robert Goolrick
#31. The company increased as light was let into the house. But
Robert Goolrick
#32. But I told my grandmother, and she listened, and then she said, "Don't ever tell this story to anybody else. If you tell this story to anybody else, something terrible will happen. Something terrible will happen to our family." And then she had a lot to do. (174)
Robert Goolrick
#33. Children remember staying up late. Grownups think about getting up early
Robert Goolrick
#34. He wanted to slice her open and lie inside the warm blood of her body.
Robert Goolrick
#35. I tell these stories because I have lied about my life to people who have been kind to me and I am tired of lying. I tell it because I don't want people to think that I have fucked up my life over and over just because I was in a bad mood.
Robert Goolrick
#38. Their love for me was both a myth and a torture and so I wrecked everything. I hurt them, and I left them hurting.
Robert Goolrick
#39. I would give anything, anything, to be the man to whom this has not happened. I can not accommodate myself to it. In a lifetime of trying, I can not accommodate myself to it.
And now I will have to be that person forever.
Robert Goolrick
#40. Now it's your land. But it's important, at least to me,that you remember that it's not just your land. There is a history. Now you're part of it. Good night. And off they go.
Robert Goolrick
#41. She had always been a chameleon, taking on accents and manners suited to her circumstance, but now she felt as though she had changed into something new, and she couldn't change back.
Robert Goolrick
#42. She had no one in the world. Her whole world, what was left of it, was here, and there was no way to get back to where she had been before. The
Robert Goolrick
#43. Every exchange making him feel like an idiot, making him draw his spine up straight and making him fiddle with his hair, and all he wanted to do was to see her naked on the floor. Not brutal, not unkind, enraptured.
Robert Goolrick
#44. We want to do something with the time we have, something that will give that time a certain meaning, a certain weight.
Robert Goolrick
#45. He loved her so much he felt his bones would break. Loving her was like lying in a bed of nettles, and the feel of her skin against his was the only balm, the only time the stinging stopped, while, for her, he was the warm bath she took to stave off the cold waterfall of Boaty's indifference.
Robert Goolrick
#46. Success has a million musical nuances. Failure is only the monotonous banging of a brass gong.
Robert Goolrick
#47. I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.
Robert Goolrick
#49. It's a sad thing to watch your best friend turn into somebody you don't know anymore. Or even want to know.
Robert Goolrick
#50. Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book.
Robert Goolrick
#51. Hell could be like this ... It could be cold enough to sear the skin from your bones.
Robert Goolrick
#52. What makes a child of four realize that something awful is going to happen? (168)
Robert Goolrick
#53. There is a loveliness to life that does not fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency toward grace that does not fail us.
Robert Goolrick
#54. I think kissing is what separates us from the animals and makes us divine.
Robert Goolrick
#57. Women do that as they age, they lighten, become air, their souls ephemeral with memory and experience. Men become more ponderous with the passing of the years, heavy with regret.
Robert Goolrick
#58. Sometime, Mrs. Truitt, we work very hard at something, we exhaust ourselves to accomplish something which seems vital to us." He chose his words with care. "Our best hope for happiness. And sometimes we find that thing, only to find it has simply not been worth the effort.
Robert Goolrick
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