Sarah Manguso Quotes

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? ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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

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

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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, ~ Sarah Manguso

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

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

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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

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

Difficulty becomes familiar, at least, if no less difficult. ~ Sarah Manguso

You can choose your friends but not your friendships. ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

Bad art is from no one to no one. ~ Sarah Manguso

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

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

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

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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

Biographies should also contain the events that failed to foreshadow. ~ Sarah Manguso

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

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? ❖ ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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

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

You'll never know what your mother went through. ~ Sarah Manguso

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. ~ Sarah Manguso

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

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

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

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

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

My point is,' Jamie continued, 'not everything's perfect, especially at the beginning. And it's all right to have a little bit of regret every once in a while. It's when you feel it all the time and can't do anything about it ... that's when you get into trouble.'
pg 169-170 ~ Sarah Dessen

You'd better solve the problem by yourself than have to ask the solution to others, who don't know how you feel. ~ Sarah Diza

It was made clear to me that I wasn't supposed to trouble the moody Creator with any pesky questions about the eccentricities of His cosmic system ... Thus my idea of heaven was that I got to spend eternity sitting at the feet of God, grilling Him. "Let me get this straight," I'd say, by way of introduction. "It's your position that every person born has to suffer because Eve couldn't resist a healthy between-meals snack? ~ Sarah Vowell

I discovered that words are alchemy, that words really can save us. ~ Sarah Combs

Every day as I wave to my children when I drop them off at school, or let one of them have a new experience - like crossing the street without holding my hand - I experience the struggle between love and non-attachment. It is hard to bear - the extreme love of one's child and the thought that ultimately the child belongs to the world. There is this horrible design flaw - children are supposed to grow up and away from you; and one of you will die first. ~ Sarah Ruhl

My sisters had been living in the House of Wind since they'd arrived in Velaris.
They did not leave the palace built into the upper parts of a flat-topped mountain overlooking the city. They did not ask for anything, or anyone.
So I would go to them.
Lucien was waiting in the sitting room when Rhys and I came downstairs at last, my mate having given the silent order for them to return.
Unsurprisingly, Cassian and Azriel were casually seated in the dining room across the hall, eating lunch and marking every single breath Lucien emitted. Cassian smirked at me, brows flicking up.
I shot him a warning glare that dared him to comment. Azriel, thankfully, just kicked Cassian under the table.
Cassian gawked at Azriel as if to declare I wasn't going to say anything while I approached the open archway into the sitting room, Lucien rising to his feet. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Jared felt vaguely unsettled that she'd noticed. He wasn't used to adults scrutinizing his behavior. He hadn't meant to take take so many booksbut they were the kind he liked, about made-up olden days when the world made sense, about death and love and honor. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

Ah, the pretty whisperers! It was very well When the leaves were thick and green, awhile ago
Leaves are secret-keepers; but since the last leaf fell There is nothing hidden from the eyes below. ~ Sarah Chauncey Woolsey

Like Gallant just busted out of Goofus. ~ Sarah Wendell

Honesty isn't a verb. You can't 'honest'. It's a way of life. ~ Sarah Whitchurch

And if you are a parent, introduce your children to their neighborhood library. It will give them a real sense of independence to have their own library card and enjoy borrowing books. ~ Sarah Jessica Parker

At any given time I'm listening to the Cory Branan, Leonna Naess, Eve 6, the King's Noyse, Sean Paul, Green Day, the BoDeans, Buddy Holly, Nowell Sing We Clear ... the list goes on and on. But I rarely listen to music while I write. I start typing the lyrics. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

I had a mother who got involved in grassroot politics when I was growing up. I watched her have agency and become political in a very male-dominated world. ~ Sarah Gavron

One of them is lying. But who? ~ Sarah Pekkanen

If we are all going to have tragedies, if none of us can escape them, then surely we have to learn from them, we have to gain something. And we have to use what we have gained. Those of us who have fought tooth and nail to overcome tragedy are, after all, nothing else, proof that such things can be survived. So we can actually help others survive their tragedies too. As long as they'll let us. ~ Sarah-Kate Lynch

Like no longer having something could be a good thing, and the proof of it as well. I was used to the opposite, when absence equaled heartbreak. ~ Sarah Dessen

The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair. ~ Sarah Orne Jewett

Taking in the scene, Ella wrinkled her nose. "Drat. We missed the excitement!" "It appears we did," Vivi agreed, disappointment in her tone. "Ah, well. Next time!" Ella brightened. Alex ~ Sarah MacLean

Some set more by such things as come from a distance, but I rec'lect mother always used to maintain that folks was meant to be doctored with the stuff that grew right about 'em. ~ Sarah Orne Jewett

Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't? ~ Sarah Vowell

As much as I disagree with Sarah Palin, there's no denying that she was the victim of sexism. ~ Jessica Valenti

And I didn't think even eternity would be long enough to fix me. ~ Sarah J. Maas

The administration says, then, there are no downsides or upsides to treating terrorists like civilian criminal defendants, but a lot of us would beg to differ. ~ Sarah Palin

what isn't said can hurt the most. ~ Sarah Dessen

Things happened the way they were supposed to, and it was no use trying to predict what was going to come next. People liked to think otherwise, but what you thought had no practical influence on what eventually happened. You can't think yourself well. You can't make yourself fall out of love. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

I can tweet before going to bed at midnight or 1 and know that they're up and at 'em, and they're going to have to respond. ~ Sarah Palin

I'm fairly certain God takes notes out of my book. He should. If he knows what's good for him. ~ Sarah Noffke

A heartbeat later, his note said, Try not to moan too loudly when you dream about me. I need my beauty rest. I ~ Sarah J. Maas

A riddle wrapped up in an enigma, wrapped up in a giant pain in the ass. Well done, Kami. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

Well, there are other versions of the story," I say, thinking out loud. "Besides the throwing and the kissing." "Like what?" Frederic asks. I bite my lip. This is going to be worse than the frog-legs conversation. "Well, there's the one where the princess chops off the frog's head, and then he turns into a prince," I say all in a rush. Frederic's eyes almost pop out of his head. "I do not wish to try that one. ~ Sarah Mlynowski

Your relationship with Me is meant to be vibrant and challenging, as I invade more and more areas of your life. Do not fear change, for I am making you a new creation, with old things passing away and new things continually on the horizon. When you cling to old ways and sameness, you resist My work within you. I want you to embrace all that I am doing in your life, finding your security in Me alone. ~ Sarah Young

When we are in the realm of Conflict, we can move from the Abuse-based construction of perpetrator and victim to the more accurate recognition of the parties as the conflicted, each with legitimate concerns and legitimate rights that must be considered in order to produce just resolution. ~ Sarah Schulman

In New York, when a tree dies, nobody mourns that it was cut down in its prime. Nobody counts the rings, notifies the loved ones. There are other trees. We can always squeeze in one more. Mind the tourists. It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't wanna live there. ~ Sarah Kay

I don't know what was in my head before I met you. What did I even think about? Because whatever it was, it's not in there anymore. It's gone. I am completely, one hundred percent all the time filled up with you. ~ Sarah Henstra

I just wanted a change. My hair started hurting my back, so I went to my hairdresser and said 'Take it off.' And I'm delighted with the results. ~ Sarah Brightman

Love alone can't fix me. I'm broken in ways you can't imagine. Daily, I'm coping with scenarios I build in my head… scenarios involving you in danger. I see danger everywhere. It's who I am, what I do. I can't help the way I feel. I need to closet you, coddle you, protect you against my bosom and smother you. ~ Sarah Michelle Lynch

If you have a passion, feed it. Sometimes the passion will wane and you won't have time for it. Sometimes it will flourish and you won't have enough hours in the day to harvest it.

If it takes twenty years, so be it. Whatever happens though, if writing is something you love, don't give up. If 'it' happens you will be the happiest person on earth. If 'it' doesn't, it will still be a great legacy, if only on your own bookshelf at home. ~ Sarah Flint

One of the greatest weaknesses of Chris Mitchell's editorship of the Australian is that he has allowed Greg Sheridan to remain his foreign editor throughout. Sheridan is a man who argued in different columns that George W. Bush was the Winston Churchill of our era; that unlike mediocre politicians like Barack Obama and John McCain, the "new star" of American politics, Sarah Palin, was able to combine "celebrity" with "character"; that President Obama's "anti-Israel hysteria" was leading his administration toward "licensing a mutant strain of anti-semitism"; and that the United States would most likely be strengthened by the crash of Wall Street in September 2008. ~ Robert Manne

To me, the last mile of the Internet that very few people have successfully really done. And this is like micro local. Things that really impact your life. And noone's leveraging that yet. ~ Sarah Lacy

The truth is, all the flowers in Paris - every last petal - could never fill the void that Alma left, and I know I may always grieve. But I have come to learn that we can never lose what we love deeply and truly. It becomes part of us. ~ Sarah Jio

The Nephelle Philosophy ~ Sarah J. Maas

There appears to be but two grand master passions or movers in the human mind, namely, love and pride. And what constitutes the beauty or deformity of a man's character is the choice he makes under which banner he determines to enlist himself. But there is a strong distinction between different degress in the same thing and a mixture of two contraries. ~ Sarah Fielding

Wonderful characters rotate around and through bookshops on a daily basis, competing with and possibly even triumphing over fiction when it comes to entertainment, strangeness and inspiration. ~ Sarah Hall

I dig in the sand, and I play with pretty pictures, so I never really left kindergarten. ~ Sarah Parcak

Accepting all the good and bad about someone. It's a great thing to aspire to. The hard part is actually doing it. ~ Sarah Dessen

Still, as a kid, History Repeats Itself terrified me, mostly because I was a God-fearing child. And I mean that literally. God scared me stiff, what with the turning human beings into salt and getting them swallowed up by whales, plus the locusts and famines and, not least, making sure his own kid gets nailed to death onto wood. Every time someone would die - a cousin or grandparent or Elvis - some relative preacher would there-there it away by saying that God has a plan, and we simply have no way of knowing what that plan is. But we did know. We learned about His plan every week at Sunday school. It's called Armageddon! ~ Sarah Vowell