Goolrick Quotes

Such things happen. ~ Robert Goolrick

Nothing says hell has to be fire. ~ Robert Goolrick

Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book. ~ Robert Goolrick

If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it. ~ Robert Goolrick

But I told my grandmother, and she listened, and then she said, "Don't ever tell this story to anybody else. If you tell this story to anybody else, something terrible will happen. Something terrible will happen to our family." And then she had a lot to do. (174) ~ Robert Goolrick

Sometimes she sat and let her mind go blank and her eyes go out of focus, so that she watched the slow, jerky movements of the motes that floated across her pupils. They amazed her as a child. Now she saw them as a reflection of how she moved, floating listlessly through the world, occasionally bumping into another body without acknowledgment, and then floating on, free and alone. ~ Robert Goolrick

It was just a story about despair. ~ Robert Goolrick

You wreck your own life and then, very gently, you wreck the lives of those around you. ~ Robert Goolrick

Men only give you what they give you ... when they know they can't give you what you want. ~ Robert Goolrick

Now it's your land. But it's important, at least to me,that you remember that it's not just your land. There is a history. Now you're part of it. Good night. And off they go. ~ Robert Goolrick

She was not a woman she was a world. ~ Robert Goolrick

Their love for me was both a myth and a torture and so I wrecked everything. I hurt them, and I left them hurting. ~ Robert Goolrick

...she had brought harm to him, in the believe that nothing mattered, that no moment had consequences beyond the moment itself. She had agreed to kill him without realizing that he would die". ~ Robert Goolrick

Every week, when I change the sheets, I look at the half of the bed that has not been slept in, as pristine as the day the sheets were changed, and I wonder what happened to the possibilities of my youth. No one has ever slept in that bed but me, and I have only slept on one side of it. In the same chaste, deathlike position every night. All those years. All those years that have passed, in the utter silence of that apartment - silent except for the clink of a knife against a fork, the shutting of a cabinet door, the opening of an envelope. ~ Robert Goolrick

Sometimes I open or close the store. I have keys. I can go in any time I want. Some days, when it's my duty to open the store, I go in at eight o'clock, just to be alone and smell all those books around me. Each one is a door. Each one is a world. ~ Robert Goolrick

The thousand thousand grasses, dry now in the late-summer heat, bristle like the brittle pages of a thousand ancient books being turned by invisible scholars. Every blade and leaf and rock speaking of loss and endurance, the birds settling down for another night or two before their long, familiar hegira. The landscape he walks is an endless cascade of loss and dying and coming to life again, and he feels the immense silence of the dead and the eternal pulse of the living in the soles of his feet. ~ Robert Goolrick

Hell could be like this ... It could be cold enough to sear the skin from your bones. ~ Robert Goolrick

How most people carry on is a mystery. What they talk about at supper. How they can stand to sit in front of a TV from eight until Leno every night. How they can think bowling is fun. How they choose their neckties. How they bear the weight of everyday life without screaming. How a person can go through a whole life and never once contemplate suicide, like people who have never once wanted to be a movie star. How one young man can be handsome and strong and marry and heiress and work at Debevoise and Plimpton and retire to Nantucket to await the visits of his grandchildren, how they can be sailing in the bay while another young man, exactly like the first, can end up in a glass room in Lexington, Kentucky, on Haldol and Thorazine, without hope, without a girlfriend, without a future, and how easily the one can become the other. How one woman can take Gatorade to every one of her son's lacrosse games and another can lie in bed all day weeping, popping generic drugs, watching Oprah as though waiting for the Second Coming, and piling her dirty dishes in the laundry room. How life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep. It's a mystery and there is no answer. (95) ~ Robert Goolrick

The thing is, all memory is fiction. You have to remember that. Of course, there are things that actually, certifiably happened, things you can pinpoint the day, the hour, the minute. When you think about it, though, those things, mostly seem to happen to other people.
This story actually happened, and it happened pretty much the way I am going to tell it to you. It's a true story as much as six decades or telling and remembering can allow it to be true. Time changes things, and you don't always get everything right. You remember a little thing clear as a bell, the weather, say, or the splash of light on the river's ripples as the sun was going down into the black pines. things not even connected to anything in particular, while other things, big things even, come completely disconnected and no longer have any shape or sound. The little things seem more real than the big things. ~ Robert Goolrick

You can live with hopelessness for only so long before you are, in fact, hopeless. ~ Robert Goolrick

He wanted to slice her open and lie inside the warm blood of her body. ~ Robert Goolrick

I would give anything, anything, to be the man to whom this has not happened. I can not accommodate myself to it. In a lifetime of trying, I can not accommodate myself to it.
And now I will have to be that person forever. ~ Robert Goolrick

How life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep. ~ Robert Goolrick

Women do that as they age, they lighten, become air, their souls ephemeral with memory and experience. Men become more ponderous with the passing of the years, heavy with regret. ~ Robert Goolrick

Somewhere in the pain there is pleasure, and that is the most awful part, perhaps. (170) ~ Robert Goolrick

I think kissing is what separates us from the animals and makes us divine. ~ Robert Goolrick

Play the hand you have, Antonio, that's all anybody expects. And it's a pretty good hand." "I'm ~ Robert Goolrick

There is a loveliness to life that does not fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency toward grace that does not fail us. ~ Robert Goolrick

I'm not having much of a life. It's not awful, just ordinary. I am trying to accommodate the memories of the life I had with the life I am now living, and I just can't do it. After being behind the wheel of a Lamborghini going 140 down Sunset Drive at four a.m., it's hard to get up and put on a polyester shirt and sell books at Barnes and Noble. But I'm not ashamed of it. ~ Robert Goolrick

We want to do something with the time we have, something that will give that time a certain meaning, a certain weight. ~ Robert Goolrick

But this here, the valley of sweet Virginia, this is the blissful shore. There is no more to reach for. But, humming, he knows. He knows what he believes. He believes in the strength of muscle, the pleasures of the body, the goodness of the heart. He believes in goodness, and this is a new thing, a gift to him from the river and the land and the blue light now almost black, the ink of the sky pocked with stars. This is what the valley and its waters whisper into his ear, in this evening into night. He believes at this moment, and he will always believe it, that people are good, and that he is good among them. ~ Robert Goolrick

Here's another thing: There are certain wounds that never heal, certain hurts that never leave you alone, like a broken bone that heals wrong and always twinges when it's about to rain. ~ Robert Goolrick

I know nothing will happen when I tell you I love you. There's no way. You're regular. I'm, well, whatever I am, I'm not regular. I'm not telling you because of that. I'm just telling you so that, when you hail a cab or answer the phone, when you walk into a roomful of strangers, you'll know that there is somebody in the world who loves you and will always love you, wherever you go, whatever happens, until the end of time. Don't ever forget that. Promise you will never forget that you are loved. ~ Robert Goolrick

I wasn't safe. I wasn't permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn't there. There was nobody home. ~ Robert Goolrick

I heard this old country guy say once, "I think you decide pretty early on how happy you're going to be, and then you just go on and be it." But I don't think that's the case for a lot of people. For a lot of people, for a lot of the people I met in the bin, I think personal choice has very little to do with it. ~ Robert Goolrick

Then there was survival. There was going on, as she had always gone on, without much joy, against her will, against her instincts, without the stomach for it, but on and on and on, without relief, without release, without a hand to reach out and touch her heart. Without kindness or comfort. But on.
Forced into such poverty, imprisoned in such despair, there was only one thing she was sure she could do. She could survive. ~ Robert Goolrick

Success has a million musical nuances. Failure is only the monotonous banging of a brass gong. ~ Robert Goolrick

For every question, there is a book. ~ Robert Goolrick

Catherine Land liked the beginnings of things. The pure white possibility of the empty room, the first kiss, the first swipe at larceny. And endings, she liked endings, too. The drama of the smashing glass, the dead bird, the tearful goodbye, the last awful word which could never be unsaid or unremembered.
It was the middles that gave her pause. This, for all its forward momentum, this was a middle. The beginnings were sweet, the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than that. ~ Robert Goolrick

I tell these stories because I have lied about my life to people who have been kind to me and I am tired of lying. I tell it because I don't want people to think that I have fucked up my life over and over just because I was in a bad mood. ~ Robert Goolrick

She had always been a chameleon, taking on accents and manners suited to her circumstance, but now she felt as though she had changed into something new, and she couldn't change back. ~ Robert Goolrick

If you had been there you would not have noticed. You would not have noticed your own stillness in this thin slice of time. But, if you had been there and you had, in some unfathomable way, recorded the stillness, taken a negative of it as the glass plate receives the light, to be developed later, you would have known, when the thought, the recollection was finally developed, that this was the moment it began. The clock ticked. The hour struck. Everything moved again. The train was late. ~ Robert Goolrick

As you have been on the road, what have you been hearing from readers about A RELIABLE WIFE?
RG: The most interesting question came from a young man in his 30s who asked me to discuss the relationship between love and aging. We think when we're young that, as we get older, our passions and enthusiasms will fade, will lose their hold on us, and we will enter into some more gentle phase. I don't find it to be true. Our passions, in fact, intensify, like a sauce that has been reduced to its essence by long slow simmering over a low flame. ~ Robert Goolrick

What makes a child of four realize that something awful is going to happen? (168) ~ Robert Goolrick

She believed in the miraculous. Or she had, until she reached an age when, all of a sudden, she realized that the life she was living, was in fact, her life. The clay of her being, so long infinitely malleable, had been formed, hardened into what now seemed a palpable, unchanging object. A shell she inhabited. It shocked her then. It shocked her now, like a slap in the face. ~ Robert Goolrick

Children remember staying up late. Grownups think about getting up early ~ Robert Goolrick

In times of grief, you're waiting for something to happen, but the thing you're waiting for has already taken place. ~ Robert Goolrick

He would move from city to city as he had always done, using people, soiling them like sheets and walking away, to find fresh faces and new diversions. ~ Robert Goolrick

The thing is, all memory is fiction, ~ Robert Goolrick

We tend to go on loving the things the people who loved us loved. They are invested with soul, even if the people are long dead, even if they do not turn out to be who you thought they were. ~ Robert Goolrick

She had agreed to marry him without realizing that marriage brought a kind a simple pleasure, a pleasure in the continued company of another human being, the act of caring, of carrying with you the thought of someone else. She would, she supposed, never see him age beyond the present day, and found that the thought made her immeasurably sad. Somewhere, ~ Robert Goolrick

When you're young, and you head out to wonderful, everything is fresh and bright as a brand new penny, but before you get to wonderful you're going to have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, stop and take a good long look, because that may be as far as you're ever going to go. ~ Robert Goolrick

It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be. ~ Robert Goolrick

It's a sad thing to watch your best friend turn into somebody you don't know anymore. Or even want to know. ~ Robert Goolrick

Even if we choose to sever the ties to all we ever knew as home, to redefine the spaces we live in, the emotions that seem most natural to us, the ways we have of loving, there is a haunting feeling of loss and admiration for the people we knew first and best. Even if we never speak to them again, they are our first and purest loves. There is, for all of us, a time in which they meant the world. Sometimes, that time lasts as long as we live. It is eternal as breath. It is changeless and deathless. Sometimes, it ends at a very early age. Sometimes, we cannot help ourselves. Things happen. (203) ~ Robert Goolrick