Top 53 Sarah Manguso Quotes
#1. I tend to forget that my measurement of time is designed to distract me from what's really happening.
Sarah Manguso
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Difficulty becomes familiar, at least, if no less difficult.
Sarah Manguso
#5. 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
#6. On the page, these might look like the stones of a ruin, strewn by time and weather, but I was here.
Sarah Manguso
#7. Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book's quotable passages.
Sarah Manguso
#8. Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.
Sarah Manguso
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn't that they'll remember; it's that you'll remember.
Sarah Manguso
#13. Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity.
Sarah Manguso
#14. I reread my favorite books to make sure they're still perfect, but rereading them wears away at their perfection.
Sarah Manguso
#15. the wild velocity of motherhood, an enforced momentum forbidding contemplation.
Sarah Manguso
#16. You can choose your friends but not your friendships.
Sarah Manguso
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Progress takes place in the dark, when you aren't trying.
Sarah Manguso
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little.
Sarah Manguso
#23. 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
#24. If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it.
Sarah Manguso
#25. 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
#26. Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing.
Sarah Manguso
#27. Nothing, nobody matters. And yet the world is full of love
Sarah Manguso
#28. I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.
Sarah Manguso
#29. It takes time to recover from having run somewhere. But sometimes one just wants to run. Anywhere.
Sarah Manguso
#30. 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
#31. When a student surpasses my expectations, I feel proud and betrayed.
Sarah Manguso
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. I wanted to remember what I could bear to remember and convince myself it was all there was.
Sarah Manguso
#35. Sometimes a single sentence can be enough to fill the imagination completely. And sometimes a book's title is enough.
Sarah Manguso
#36. I've written whole books in order to avoid writing other books.
Sarah Manguso
#37. This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.
Sarah Manguso
#38. The memory and maybe the fact of every kiss start disappearing the moment the two mouths part.
Sarah Manguso
#39. You'll never know what your mother went through.
Sarah Manguso
#40. Slowly, slowly, I accumulate sentences. I have no idea what I'm doing until suddenly it reveals itself, almost done.
Sarah Manguso
#41. Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us - by taking everything.
Sarah Manguso
#42. 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
#44. One must be able to empathize with a suicide yet not become one.
Sarah Manguso
#45. 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
#46. I'd never have guessed which people I'd still know by now.
Sarah Manguso
#47. 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
#48. Only a fire can teach you what survives a fire. No, it teaches you what can survive that fire.
Sarah Manguso
#49. The trouble with setting goals is that you're constantly working toward what you used to want.
Sarah Manguso
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. It isn't so much that geniuses make it look easy; it's that they make it look it fast.
Sarah Manguso
#53. 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
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