Quotes from Robert Goolrick

But I don't think that's the case for a lot of people. For a lot of people, for a lot the people I met in the bin, I think personal choice has very little to do with it.

I loved kissing them on the mouth, the taste of their tongues. I think kissing is what separated us from the animals and makes us divine.

He walked home, completely at peace. He knew now he would go on doing the things he was doing -- going to work, buying up land he didn't understand, seeing Sylvan Glass for reasons he couldn't help. But he also knew it would all be fine, whatever happened. He knew it was the right thing to do. He was in the place he was meant to be. He was home, finally, at the happy and complete end of his long and troubled road. He was home.

We all wanted to be somebody else. Somebody braver, or more handsome, or smarter. It's what children want. It's what you grow out of, if you're lucky. If you don't, it's a lifetime of agony.

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.

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,

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

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.

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

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, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life (Algonquin Books, March 23, 2007)

But there was no use. There was no point. It was just a story. It was just a story of people, of Ralph and Emilia and Antonio and Catherine and the mothers and the fathers who had died, too soon or late, of people who had hurt one another as much as people can do, who had been selfish and not wise, and had become trapped inside the bitter walls of memories they wished they had never had. It

Such things happen.

The company increased as light was let into the house. But

She had no one in the world. Her whole world, what was left of it, was here, and there was no way to get back to where she had been before. The

Every day there was some new tragedy, some new and inexplicable failure of the ordinary.

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

She was just a simple, honest woman standing in the ruin of a late winter garden, waiting for the spring. "Catherine.

She thought of her life, her patchwork quilt of a life, pieced together from castoff scraps of this and that; experience, knowledge, clairvoyance. None of it made any sense to her.

Be not dishearten'd—Affection shall solve the problems of Freedom yet; Those who love each other shall become invincible. —WALT WHITMAN, "Over the Carnage Rose a Prophetic Voice

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.

walk in the middle of the street. At two in

She knew there were parts of the past you had to let go of, certain lands that were irredeemably lost, sorrowfully lost, but, finally, lost forever.

Time will tell if sorry is enough. I don't think it is. If you died tonight, I wouldn't come to your funeral." "You'd

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.