Quotes from Sarah Manguso

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.

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

You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing. You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness into brightness.

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.

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

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.

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

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

My existence shrank from an arrow of light pointing into the future forever to a speck of light that was the present moment. I got better at living in that point of light, making the world into that point. I paid close attention to it. I loved it very much.

You'll never know what your mother went through.

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

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

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

Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.

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

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.

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.

Some people will punish you merely for witnessing their weakness. Even if they sought you out and asked for help. Even if you helped. Especially if you helped.

Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws ... I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn't a character flaw.

Only a fire can teach you what survives a fire. No, it teaches you what can survive that fire.

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.

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.

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.