Brian Morton Quotes

#1. What matters, finally, isn't finding the kind of person you think you should
love. What matters is finding someone you feel more alive with.

Brian Morton

#2. It isn't a bad thing to remember that you have some wildness in you, that not every inch of your soul is honorable and responsible and presentable and tamped and tamed.

Brian Morton

#3. Even in your smallest gestures, you express your sense of honor, if you have one.

Brian Morton

#4. He wanted to live without distractions; he wanted to focus all the life-force he had left on this last book. But now it was hard to concentrate. There was something new in his life. There was the painful distraction of desire.

Brian Morton

#5. What appalled Schiller about these libraries was that they featured nothing off the beaten track: no tattered paperbacks; no evidence of distinctive personal interests; no tokens of long intellectual detours passionately explored.

Brian Morton

#6. An artist doesn't really need a great deal of experience. One heartbreak can produce many novels. But you have to have a heart that can break.

Brian Morton

#7. I'm a tough guy, and I like pitching in tough games.

Tim Hudson

#8. Every choice we make is either a grwoth choice or a fear choice.

Brian Morton

#9. He disapproved of the metaphor: he wanted to tell her that one shouldn't compare one's personal unhappiness to the most horrible crime in history.

Brian Morton

#10. What you are is a complicated girl with simple needs. You need your books and time to read, and you need a few friends and you need someone-not to take care of you, but to care for you. If you have all those things, you'll always be alright.

Brian Morton

#11. People, Florence thought as she put on her shoes. What do I need them for again?

Brian Morton

#12. We wish for a symmetry of feeling, but we rarely get it. It is painful to be the one who loves more, and painful to be the one who loves less.

Brian Morton

#13. Old soldiers never die, they just lose their grip on reality after traumatic brain injuries.

Douglas MacArthur

#14. Heather resented it that this woman was his daughter. How does a writer of the most subtle, serious fiction end up with a daughter who watches Oprah? I'd be a better daughter for him than she is.

Brian Morton

#15. Even the lies were true.

Barry Lyga

#16. Sit. I can't flirt standing up, and you're freakishly tall.

Heidi Cullinan

#17. Coincidence. But the eagerness to find meaning in such coincidences is love.

Brian Morton

#18. It's probably true that you're forging your own character during every minute of every day, with every decision you make, but there are some moments in which this is more clear than in others.

Brian Morton

#19. Without her glasses Vivian did look a little frightening. She had tight sinewy strappy muscles and a face that was hardened and almost brutal - a face that might have been chiseled by a sculptor who had fallen out of love with the idea of beauty.

Brian Morton

#20. The parasite of art, the virus of art, never ceases to gnaw awat at your brain, never ceases to torture you with the knowledge that whatever you're doing could be done more beautifully, more powerfully, more stirringly, more disturbingly, more deeply.

Brian Morton

#21. The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories. Nothing has meaning in itself: all the objects in the world would be shards of bare mute blankness, spinning wildly out of orbit, if we didn't bind them together with stories.

Brian Morton

#22. His kisses were too rote; they were assembly-line kisses. She wanted complex kisses; she wanted each kiss to be a conversation.

Brian Morton

#23. You understood me; you helped me understand myself. If reading a book is a naked encounter between two people, I have known you nakedly for years.

Brian Morton

#24. There are certain situations in which you can't convey what you mean. Words don't always work.

Brian Morton

#25. Knowledge is always a good thing, even when it makes us unhappy

Brian Morton

#26. It wasn't that she wanted to seduce him - not literally. But flirting was a pleasure, and flirting with intelligent people - male or female - was one of the supreme pleasures of life.

Brian Morton

#27. She loved to return to the world of the book, a workd in which people were willing to let go of everything in order to follow their passions.

Brian Morton

#28. The river was so blue it seemed to be breathing.

Brian Morton

#29. A trip to the market in the morning to buy bread, an afternoon spent reading in a cafe - nothing was routine; a strange place helped you find the poetry in everyday life.

Brian Morton

#30. The moments of beauty, the moments when you feel blessed, are only moments; but memory and imagination, treasuring them, can string them together ... Everything else passes away; that which you love remains.

Brian Morton

#31. A piece of writing is only worth doing if you're a different person at the end of the process than you were at the beginning.

Brian Morton

#32. It's a matter of style. The Evan Hunter style and the Ed McBain style are very, very different.

Evan Hunter

#33. A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#34. Take the risk that you'll end up regretting your speech, because it's better than regretting your silence.

Brian Morton

#35. I tend to wear outfits that match the walls.

Debra Winger

#36. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all.

Brian Morton