Sarah Manguso Quotes

One must be able to empathize with a suicide yet not become one.

The fastest way to revise a piece of work is to send it, late at night, to someone whose opinion you fear. Then rewrite it, praying you'll finish in time to send a new version by morning.

If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it.

Who seems a harmless fool to those above him is a malevolence to those beneath.

The memory and maybe the fact of every kiss start disappearing the moment the two mouths part.

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,

There will come a time when people decide you've had enough of your grief, and they'll try to take it away from you.

The trouble was that I failed to record so much , I wrote, but how could I have believed that if I tried hard enough, I could remember everything? ❖

Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.

When I was twenty-three I began seeing a psychotherapist because I couldn't bear the idea that, after the end of an affair, all our shared memories might be expunged from the mind of the other, that they might no longer exist outside my own belief they'd happened. I couldn't accept the possibility of being the only one who would remember everything about those moments as carefully as I tried to remember them. My life, which exists mostly in the memories of the people I've known, is deteriorating at the rate of physiological decay. A color, a sensation, the way someone said a single word - soon it will all be gone. In a hundred and fifty years no one alive will ever have known me. Being forgotten like that, entering that great and ongoing blank, seems more like death than death.

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.

I read sad stories to inoculate myself against grief. I watch action movies to identify with the quick-witted heroes. Both the same fantasy: I'll escape the worst of it.

I tend to forget that my measurement of time is designed to distract me from what's really happening.

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.

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.

Nothing, nobody matters. And yet the world is full of love

You'll never know what your mother went through.

Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing.

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.

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.

The trouble with setting goals is that you're constantly working toward what you used to want.

You can choose your friends but not your friendships.

My students still don't know what they will never be. Their hope is so bright I can almost see it.

I used to value the truth of whether this student or that one would achieve the desired thing. I don't value that truth anymore as much as I value their untested hope. I don't care that one in two hundred of them will ever become what they feel they must become. I care only that I am able to witness their faith in what's coming next.

I no longer believe in anything other than the middle, but my students still believe in beginnings. Ask them, and they will tell you that everything is about to start in just a moment, just one more moment.

the wild velocity of motherhood, an enforced momentum forbidding contemplation.

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.

We like stories that are false and seem true (realist novels), that are true and seem false (true crime), that are false and seem false (dragons and superheroes), or that are true and seem true, but it's harder to agree on what that is.

Bad art is from no one to no one.

My considerate friend insists on hearing about my troubles first, and after several minutes of excavation, I'm drowning in them and can't sufficiently attend to hers. But I'm doing her a favor, letting her escape her suffering into mine.

Biographies should also contain the events that failed to foreshadow.

When a student surpasses my expectations, I feel proud and betrayed.

The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn't that they'll remember; it's that you'll remember.

It was a failure of my imagination that made me keep leaving people. All I could see in the world were beginnings and endings: moments to survive, record, and, once recorded, safely forget. I knew I was getting somewhere when I began losing interest in the beginnings and the ends of things. Short tragic love stories that had once interested me no longer did. What interested me was the kind of love to which the person dedicates herself for so long, she no longer remembers quite how it began.

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.

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?

Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us - by taking everything.

The trouble with comparing yourself to others is that there are too many others. Using all others as your control group, all your worst fears and all your fondest hopes are at once true. You are good; you are bad; you are abnormal; you are just like everyone else.

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.

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.

Respect the one-hit wonder not for his one hit but for all the days he must have suffered afterward, trying for another.

Difficulty becomes familiar, at least, if no less difficult.

Sometimes a single sentence can be enough to fill the imagination completely. And sometimes a book's title is enough.

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.

I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.

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.

Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity.

It takes time to recover from having run somewhere. But sometimes one just wants to run. Anywhere.

Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little.

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.

Like a vase, a heart breaks once. After that, it just yields to its flaws.

Whatever you're feeling, billions already have. Feel for them.

Progress takes place in the dark, when you aren't trying.

It's impossible to fail if one doesn't know how the end should look. And it's impossible to succeed. But it's possible to enjoy.