Andrew Sean Greer Quotes

Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that's a success. Twenty years of anything with another person is a success. If a band stays together twenty years, it's a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they're a triumph. Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour? Is the sun a failure because it's going to end in a billion years? No, it's the fucking sun. Why does a marriage not count? It isn't in us, it isn't in human beings, to be tied to one person forever.

She stands behind the reception desk, dwarfed and age speckled as a winter starling, perhaps ninety years old, and chattering, chattering away, as if a cure for his inability to speak Japanese were the application of more Japanese (a hair-of-the-dog sensibility). And yet some how, from his months of travel and pantomime, his pathetic journey into empathic and telepathic, he feels he does understand.

From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad.

You should kiss me like it's goodbye.

It is almost another kind of love, being loved. It is the same heat but from another room; it is the same sound but from a high window ...

Her head jerked around. "It's so unlikely to be alive, isn't it? The right temperature, and gravity, the right atoms combining at the precise moment, you'd think it would never happen." She stood looking at a painting with a hand to her cheek, then watched the cat making its way across the sofa toward the bird. "Life, it's so unlikely," she said, then turned to me again. "It's so much better than we think, isn't it?

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

I recall how the flash of her glowing dress against my closing eyelids was like the neon glow of hotels flashing VACANCY VACANCY on a long night ride. I felt the weight of my mind hanging from a branch, pulling, pulling, and before I knew it the stem had snapped and I was falling, blind, into the void.

Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young."
"Yes! It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.

I absolutely look at people's bookshelves. And I have some judgment. I mean, they're openly showing you themselves.

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.

I need you to do my bow tie. I forget how because I know you never will. Prizes aren't love, but this is love.

Yes, even old American writers are dancing like it is still the eighties in San Francisco, like the sexual revolution has been won, like the war is over and Berlin has been liberated, one's own self has been liberated; and what the Bavarian in his arms is whispering is true, and everyone, everyone - even Arthur Less - is loved.

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

A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.

Men in their forties were so sexy: the calm assurance of what a man liked and didn't, where he set limits and where he set none, experience and a sense of adventure. It made the sex so much better.

You cannot go around in grief and panic every day; people will not let you, they will coax you with tea and tell you to move on, bake cakes and paint walls. [ ... ] So what you do is you let them coax you. You bake the cake and paint the wall and smile; you buy a new freezer as if you now had a plan for the future. And secretly
in the early morning
you sew a pocket in your skin. At the hollow of your throat. So that every time you smile, or nod your head at a teacher meeting, or bend over to pick up a fallen spoon, it presses and pricks and stings and you know you've not moved on. You never even planned to.

When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.

The heart will hear only one sound. A "no" will pass unnoticed, and a "good-bye" will be heard only as a deferral of hope; the future is unmarred, pushed forward by events but untouched by them because the heart sees only a perfect future. The rest, as they say, is noise. There is only one sound it can hear. There is only "yes.

And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid.

We are deaf to what life brings us.

she began as always. "To let Mr. Michelson

I know I'm out of your life / But the day that I die / I know you are going to cry.

They have come dressed as robots or space goddesses or aliens because a writer has changed their lives.

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

His brain sits before its cash register again, charging him for old shames as if he has not paid before

There is nothing like that for the boys who did not go to war; they were not soldiers, and did not die. They are burned out of history, for nothing blazes quite as hot as shame. There are no bills in circulation. But I have signed their names to this story. I have signed all of our names.
How else will we be remembered?

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.

And yet what she has said--the lying brain--this is familiar; this has happened to him. Not exactly like this, not utter terrifying madness, but he knows his brain has told him things he has traveled around the world to forget. That the mind cannot be trusted is a certainty.

A white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows?
Jesus, I guess so.
Arthur. Sorry to tell you this. It's a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that.
Even gay?
Even gay.

Why is it so impossible to believe: that we are as many headed as monsters, as many armed as gods, as many hearted as angels?

Perhaps he was burning down a house in which he no longer wanted to live.

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.

We think we know the ones we love, and though we should not be surprised to find that we don't, it is heartbreak nonetheless. It is the hardest kind of knowledge, not just about another but about ourselves. To see our lives as a fiction we have written and believed. Silence and lies. The sensation I felt that evening
that I did not know my Holland, did not know myself, that it was perhaps impossible to know a single soul on earth
it was a fearful loneliness.

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

It seems to begin before dawn with the Muslims, when a mosque at the edge of the mangrove forest softly announces, in a lullaby voice, the morning call to prayer. Not to be outdone, the local Christians soon crank up pop-sounding hymns that last anywhere from one to three hours. This is followed by cheerful, though overamplified, kazoo-like refrain from the Hindu temple that reminds Less of the ice cream truck from his childhood. Then comes a later call to prayer. Then the Christians decide to ring some bronze bells. And so on. There are sermons and live singers and thunderous drum performances. In this way, the faiths alternate throughout the day, as at a music festival, growing louder and louder until, during the outright cacophony of sunset, the Muslims, who began the whole thing, declare victory by projecting not only the evening call to prayer but the prayer itself in its entirety. After that, the jungle falls to silence. Perhaps this is the Buddhists' sole contribution. Every morning, it starts again.

As the Japanese will tell you, one can train a rose to grow through anything, to grow through a nautilus even, but it must be done with tenderness.

Where was he? Somewhere in there he lost the first phase of youth, like the first phase of a rocket; it had fallen, depleted, behind him. And here was the second. And last. He swore he would not give it to anyone; he would enjoy it. He would enjoy it alone. But: how to live alone and yet not be alone?

If you clenched your right hand in a fist, that would be my San Francisco, knocking on the Golden Gate. Your little finger would be sunny downtown on the bay, and your thumb would be our Ocean Beach out on the blue Pacific. They called it the Sunset ... It sat on the very edge of the continent, with fog so dense and silver you hardly ever saw a sunset in the Sunset ...

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

The garden was planted four hundred years ago, when the surrounding area was poplar." The woman makes a sweeping gesture, and he nods in appreciation.
"And now," Less says, "it's unpoplar.

Arthur Less is the first homosexual ever to grow old. That is, at least, how he feels at times like these. Here, in this tub, he should be twenty-five or thirty, a beautiful young man naked in a bathtub. Enjoying the pleasures of life. How dreadful if someone came upon naked Less today: pink to his middle, gray to his scalp, like those old double erasers for pencil and ink. He has never seen another gay man age past fifty, none except Robert. He met them all at forty or so but never saw them make it much beyond; they died of AIDS, that generation. Less's generation often feels like the first to explore the land beyond fifty. How are they meant to do it? Do you stay a boy forever, and dye your hair and diet to stay lean and wear tight shirts and jeans and go out dancing until you drop dead at eighty? Or do you do the opposite - do you forswear all that, and let your hair go gray, and wear elegant sweaters that cover your belly, and smile on past pleasures that will never come again? Do you marry and adopt a child? In a couple, do you each take a lover, like matching nightstands by the bed, so that sex will not vanish entirely? Or do you let sex vanish entirely, as heterosexuals do? Do you experience the relief of letting go of all that vanity, anxiety, desire, and pain?

Then I traveled. Quite a bit, in fact. You have to stockpile a few beautiful vistas in your memory, Pearlie. In case we're rationed again.

It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart.

We have no heart at seventeen. We think we do; we think we have been cursed with a holy, bloated thing that twitches at the name we adore, but it is not a heart because though it will forfeit anything in the world-the mind, the body, the future, even the last lonely hour it has-it will not sacrifice itself.

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.

I have a randezvous with life.

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.

There are always a few drops left in the bottle of indignity.

We are each the love of someone's life.

Some accidental frequency in the siren had lit a gene like a flare in their rib cages, freeing them - for what greater freedom could there be than to forget your home?

We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations; it is the salt in the pudding. Didn't Roman generals hire slaves to march beside them in a triumphant parade and remind them that they too would die? Even your narrator, one morning after what should have been a happy occasion, was found shivering at the end of the bed (spouse: "I really wish you weren't crying right now"). Don't little children, awakened one morning and told, "Now you're five!" - don't they wail at the universe's descent into chaos? The sun slowly dying, the spiral arm spreading, the molecules drifting apart second by second toward our inevitable heat death - shouldn't we all wail to the stars?

Maybe I'm a bad writer."
"No. You're a very good writer. Kalipso was a chef d'oeuvre. So beautiful, Arthur. I admired it a lot."
Now Less is stumped. He probes his weaknesses. Too magniloquent? Too spoony? "Too old?" he ventures.
"We're all over fifty, Arthur. It's not that you're a bad writer." Finley pauses for effect. "It's that you're a bad gay.

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

The impossible happens once to each of us

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

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

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

It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they've survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It's that they've survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more impatiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost any sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.

It is a traveler's fallacy that one should shop for clothing while abroad. Those white linen tunics, so elegant in Greece, emerge from the suitcase as mere hippie rags; the beautiful striped shirts of Rome are confined to the closet; and the delicate hand batiks of Bali are first cruise wear, then curtains, then signs of impending madness.

You have the luck of a comedian. Bad luck in things that don't matter. Good luck in things that do.

Margaret herself hadn't known her body was a parish bell tolling at every heartbreak she heard of, and that night with Pete calmly sitting on the edge of her favorite chair, invading her private room with words this room was sealed from, she felt it just as a bell would. It struck her right inside, until her bronze skin rang out the news. Not of Pete's story, which had not even made him cry, but some other story she'd been trying not to tell herself. So she sat stiffly there and wept, clanging and clanging like a thing that tested its own breaking.

There on the dune, beside the table, one of the camel boys has his arm around the other, and they sit there like that as they watch the sun. The dunes are turning the same shades of adobe and aqua as the buildings of Marrakech. Two boys, arms around each other. To Less, it seems so foreign. It makes him sad. In his world, he never sees straight men doing this. Just as a gay couple cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Marrakech, he thinks, two men, best friends, cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Chicago. They cannot sit on a dune like these teenagers and watch a sunset in each other's embrace. This Tom Sawyer love for Huck Finn.

There is a truth that everyone knows but you. Each of us has it; no one is immune. Not a secret, not a scandal, but something simple and obvious to everyone else. It can be as simple as losing weight, or as difficult as leaving a husband. How awful, to sense that everybody knows the thing that would change your life, and yet no one is friend enough to tell you! You are left to guess, all by yourself. Until that moment comes when it reveals itself to you, and of course this revelation always comes a moment too late.

Less is technically Christian. There is really no other word for someone who celebrates Christmas and Easter, even if only as craft projects.

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.

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.

Here is a writer possessing the greatest talent: that of fully inhabiting the lives of others. Spargo conjures up these two as no one has done before. Scott and Zelda become, in Spargo's remarkable novel, not people of history but of literature, and reminders of what we fight for, what we fail to win, and the beauty that abides between. A marvel of a book.

My father asked me once why I was so lazy, why I did not want the world. He asked me what I wanted, and though I did not answer then, because I did not know, and followed old conventions even to the altar, I know it now. It is long past time to answer the question - and I see you, old Arthur, old love, looking up to that silhouette on your porch - what do I want? After choosing the path people wanted, the man who would do, the easy way out of things - your eyes wide in surprise as you see me - after holding it all in my hands and refusing it, what do I want from life?

And I say: "Less!

she says, "Well, I hope you're making good use of youth."
Less, cross-legged on his towel and pink as a boiled shrimp:" I don't know."
She nods, "You should waste it."
"What's that?"
"You should be at the beach, like today. You should get stoned and drunk and have loads of sex." She takes another drag off her cigarette. "I think the saddest thing in the world is a twenty-five-year-old talking about the stock market. Or taxes. Or real estate, goddamn it! That's all you'll talk about when you're forty. Real estate! Any twenty-five-year-old who says the word refinance should be taken out and shot. Talk about love and music and poetry. Things everyone forgets they ever through were important. Waste everyday, that's what I say.

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.

With lovers, though, the end is always there. It is a death as certain as the real death, and those of us in love, as at the bedside, begin to prepare ourselves. We might say it isn't working, or I can't give you what you need, and yet a day later there he is in your arms, and who can help it? There is the good-bye, and the good-bye, and the good-bye, and which will stick? Who can ever say, this is the last? One one is true, but all of them feel true, and the tears we shed are equal every time.

He knows the absurdity of asking someone to explain love or sorrow. You can't point to it. It would be as futile, as unconveyable, as pointing at the sky and saying: that one, that star, there.

If only he could learn to lie so compassionately.

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

Did you love it, the rain dance every day? Only when it rained.

I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do, but either walk around or read a book or work on your book.

Meaning his stuffed bear who was as real to him as his mother or me. Or else as imaginary.

He kisses--how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you.

Women must be careful what we say to one another. We are almost all we have.

Who on earth would not long to be fought for? Is this not the very heart of human existence, to be worth fighting for, worth losing everything for?

Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory.