Less By Andrew Sean Greer Quotes

#1. When you were a little girl, Madam ... was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?

Andrew Sean Greer

#2. It turns out that you don't end up with the people you love; by definition, you end up with the ones who stay.

Andrew Sean Greer

#3. We are deaf to what life brings us.

Andrew Sean Greer

#4. It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.

Andrew Sean Greer

#5. Young people are inept at love; it is like being given a flying machine, and you leap inside, ready to set off as you've always dreamed, yet you don't have the first notion of how to make it start, much less how to make it move.

Andrew Sean Greer

#6. It's just that, you know how it is in some relationships, how one of them is a little more in love. Well, it's like that with friendships. Sometimes one of them thinks they're really close, closer than they are. And the other doesn't feel that way.

Andrew Sean Greer

#7. For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research.

Andrew Sean Greer

#8. It may be a childish torment, but we do not get to choose our demons.

Andrew Sean Greer

#9. So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.

Andrew Sean Greer

#10. The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?

Andrew Sean Greer

#11. It's so unlikely to be alive, isn't it? The right temperature, and gravity, the right atoms combining at the precise right moment, you'd think it would never happen.

Andrew Sean Greer

#12. The impossible happens once to each of us

Andrew Sean Greer

#13. years; they had exchanged just one letter, one glance in

Andrew Sean Greer

#14. We kept each other's stare a long time, for we had each done a startling thing, dodged time for an instant - which is the only definition of happiness I know.

Andrew Sean Greer

#15. she began as always. "To let Mr. Michelson

Andrew Sean Greer

#16. The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person.

Andrew Sean Greer

#17. How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.

Andrew Sean Greer

#18. Grief will go
it always does
but not before it forces us to do these absurd things, and hurt ourselves, and bring on suffering, because grief, that parasite, above all else does not want to die, and only in these terrible moments it creates can it feel itself thrashing back to life.

Andrew Sean Greer

#19. Change was not something you waited for, quietly, mutely, in a house by the ocean, nothing would ever change unless we forced it into shape.

Andrew Sean Greer

#20. What magnetic force draws us to scenes of pain, and words that wound us? You have seen this, I told myself as I marched along to that apartment. You have seen this already, you've lived through this, spare yourself

Andrew Sean Greer

#21. How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone.

Andrew Sean Greer

#22. No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.

Andrew Sean Greer

#23. How often in life do people make that awful sacrifice, that murder of possibilities?

Andrew Sean Greer

#24. Just one small thing had changed, such a small thing really. What difference could it make, the era in which we are born?

Andrew Sean Greer

#25. Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.

Andrew Sean Greer

#26. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what

Andrew Sean Greer

#27. We are each the love of someone's life.

Andrew Sean Greer

#28. Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.

Andrew Sean Greer

#29. Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?

Andrew Sean Greer

#30. And finally: Who are we when we're not ourselves?

Andrew Sean Greer