Garth Greenwell Quotes

What had I done but extend my rootlessness, the series of false starts that became more difficult to defend as I got older? I think I hoped I would feel new in a new country, but I wasn't new here, and if there was comfort in the idea that my habitual unease had a cause, that if I was ill-fitted to the place there was good reason, it was a false comfort, a way of running away from real remedy. But

There are lots of big books that have gay characters - or, more commonly, a gay character - in secondary roles, but seldom are their lives, and especially their sexual lives, on center stage.

I'm still primarily interested in observing as closely as possible the shifting weather between people. I think the master of this sort of thing, and a writer who has meant a great deal to me, is Henry James: there's a magical way that he has of turning the slightest gesture into a whole world of drama and feeling.

How easily we are made to feel, I thought, and with what little foundation, with no foundation at all. At

ludic: cigarette

I don't think I'm qualified to answer questions about happiness. But I guess I'd say that I don't think you ever get to put to bed something like a search for order, or any other element of your sensibility, however much you'd like to.

History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind.

For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen.

The academy is an incredibly sheltered world, and I do think it's important for writers to get out from under that shelter, at least for a while, to see what the world looks like from outside it.

I think it's harder to avoid reflection on those larger patterns of history or society when they so insistently call into question your right to exist.

I felt it give a sudden sigh, a quick unburdening of breath as it shifted its frame a little. It wasn't tied up, I saw, it could have wandered off anytime it chose; but there was nowhere for it to go, of course, and the cart I supposed was heavy, and there was something however meager to be had there where it stood.

Whatever the weather I went out and wandered, and now I wandered with K.; I introduced him to my solitude and he deepened it without disturbance.

Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But

I take pleasure as a reader in books that tease with a kind of urgency of the real, even if it's only a manufactured effect.

that I can carry on these multiple conversations, each its own window so that sometimes my screen is filled with them; and in each I have the sense of being entirely false and entirely true, like

You can't speak to him, he said, if you speak to him, if you give any sign to him at all, he will come back; he has to stop existing for you.

When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.

Like everything else in my past he was part of the story that had led us to each other; it's a way of being in love, I think, to see the past like that.

There was something in his manner of seduction, no show of desire at all; what he offered was a transaction, and again he showed no disappointment when reflexively and without hesitation I said no to him. It was the answer I had always given to such proposals (which are inevitable in the places I frequent), not out of any moral conviction but out of pride, a pride that had weakened in recent years, as I realized I was being shifted by the passage of time from one category of erotic object to another.

I had been sick before, of course, but this felt more than sickness, like a physical confirmation of shame.

Sometimes we talked the whole night long, as one does only in adolescence or very early in love. I was happy, but also I felt an anxiety that gnawed at me and for which I could find no cause, that gnawed at me more deeply precisely because I could find no cause.

I passed people shopping or walking their dogs, and young people, university students maybe, busy about their lives, so that the streets I walked seems vibrant to me, more vibrant than my own. But then almost everywhere I went I imagined a place more accommodating of the life I wanted, as if happiness were a matter of streets or parks, as maybe to a point it is; and with R. away for so long I was accustomed to thinking of my real life existing in some distant place or future time, projecting forward in a way that I was afraid might keep me from living fully where I was.

I'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas.

K. hung his arm around my neck. It was a casual gesture but one I wasn't used to, and I was almost frightened by the happiness that overtook me, that filled me up and charged me and at the same time carried a thread; it was too unrestrained, there was nothing to keep it in check. I felt solid again as I walked with him, more certain of myself than I had been for years, with his arm around my neck and my own slung at his waist We knocked against each other but what did it matter, there was no one to see us, we moved with an awkward freedom but a freedom nonetheless.

That's all care is, I thought, it's just looking at a thing long enough, why should it be a question of scale? This seemed like a hopeful thought at first, but then it's hard to look at things, or to look at them truly, and we can't look at many at once, and it's so easy to look away.

They embraced for a long time, a kind of physical contact seldom seen in public, maybe seen only between parents and their very young children, an intimacy confident of absolute possession... [h]ow quickly those embraces would pass. They would take on different meanings as the child grew older, they would become impermissible; the same touch that here warmed our hearts would just in a few years elicit our disapproval, our concern, finally our scorn. And so it is, I thought then, as the man and child released each other and moved away from the water, so it is that at the very moment we come into full consciousness of ourselves what we experience is leave-taking and a loss we seek the rest of our lives to restore.

Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.

the poorly typed lines, the symbols and abbreviations of Internet chat that make such language seem so much like a process of decay. As

I realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.

I fell back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn't welcomed, even if that welcome is contrived.

That's the worst thing about teaching, that our actions either have no force at all or have force beyond all intention, and not only our actions but our failures to act, gestures and words held back or unspoken, all we might have done and failed to do; and, more than this, that the consequences echo across years and silence, we can never really know what we've done.

As I walked along that path,

I felt drawn from myself, elated,

struck stupidly good for a moment

by the extravagant beauty of the world.

Teaching high school was my real training as a novelist: it got me out of my head, and (at least a little) out of books, and invested me in the lives of others and the world around me.

He caught me and held my gaze without welcome or warmth or any hint of what we had shared, and my sense of having violated something, of having looked where I shouldn't have faded, as I understood that this was what he wanted me to see all along, that I was there not as guard but as audience. I was there to see how different from me he was, how free of the foulness my father had shown him; and now that I had seen it, I knew our friendship had run its course.

I hope that the relationship of the title to the novel [ What Belongs To You] gets more complex with each section of the book: that maybe it begins by resonating with the question of prostitution - to what extent can a body be commodified, what exactly are you renting or purchasing when you pay for sex - and deepens over the course of the book to address larger questions of ownership and belonging.

I am a gay writer, absolutely. And in no way does that fact limit the reach or importance of what I write.

He stopped then, as if he realized he had gone too far, had leaned too hard on the fiction of our relationship and felt the false surface give way.

I studied opera, and when I left conservatory I told myself I would never sing in public again.

As we joined the line of people getting off at the last stop before Sofia, I looked once more at the little boy, whom I felt I would never forget, though maybe it wasn't exactly him I would remember, I thought, but the use I would make of him. I had my notes, I knew I would write a poem about him, and then it would be the poem I remembered, which would be both true and false at once, the image I made replacing the real image. Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn't what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn't really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it.

None of us sees history fully; none of us is adequately aware of how the arrangements of the present moment foreclose the possibilities of others to fully live their only lives.

I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.

Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.

Bulgarian phrase zryala vuzrast, ripe age, which they use for the period before one is truly old. She

You can call out for anything you desire, however aberrant or unlikely, and nearly always there comes an answer, it's a large world, we're never as solitary as we think, as unique or unprecedented, what we feel has always already been felt, again and again, without beginning or end.

Even annoyance was part of the pleasure we took in each other, we were that early in love.

the whole point of literature, I think, is that it's the best technology we have for communicating what another person's life feels like from the inside.

The fact remains that books that really put gay people in the center, and especially books that do so in a way that is sexually explicit, tend not to get a great deal of mainstream attention: they don't tend to sell well, and they don't tend to win major awards. This makes the occasional exception, like Alan Hollinghurst, all the more remarkable.

My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life.

though I thought of him often, though he appeared in dreams from which I woke more excited than I was by anything in my waking life, I didn't regret what I had done. I had missed him, but more than missing him I had been relieved that he was gone.

I guess I've done a lot of different kinds of performing at various times - opera singing, poetry reading, not least high school teaching - and I do enjoy it, at least sometimes. But I find it incredibly anxiety-producing and exhausting. Privacy is more congenial, and I go a little crazy if I can't spend a big chunk of every day, or almost every day, alone. Certainly I have to be alone to write.

I think history is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.

If there is a gay ghetto, then that's where James Baldwin is, and Thomas Mann is, and Virginia Woolf is, and that's the only place I would ever want to be. And that's not on the margins of the literary tradition: That's right at the heart of it.

... my mother reached over and laid her hand on my arm, saying that was true, ... and I felt something twist in me, the motion of some unthinking thing when it is gripped too hard, and I had to resist the urge to pull away.

words in a foreign language never wound us like words in the language to which we're born. But

[L]ike poems, cruising carves privacy out of public spaces. Poems are a kind of private communication that occurs in public speech. And I think cruising is that too: a training in reading occult codes; a way of seeing a significance in the world that most people don't see.

What tale of the two years did the sight of me tell?

but how could I explain to R., especially to him, the feeling of inevitability I had whenever Mitko appeared, as though we were in a story that had already been written.

I went back to graduate school because I wanted to avoid being a professional, to try to piece together a life that would let me avoid the tenure race and full-time teaching.

Where the novel makes use of material from my life it does so because it's aesthetically convenient, not because of any allegiance it has to any verifiable facts.