Quotes from 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.

I've written whole books in order to avoid writing other books.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I wanted to remember what I could bear to remember and convince myself it was all there was.

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.

Anger conceals pain. It also conceals love.

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.

Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book's quotable passages.

I'd never have guessed which people I'd still know by now.

When I'm back with my own memories I drink a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. It helps soften their pressure, but the effect fades. Then I think I should practice grace for what I've been given to remember, but whatever I do, I can't seem to forget what I want to forget. 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. ?

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. ?

Inner beauty can fade, too.

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

In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time. I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby's continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. I was the warmth and milk that was always there for him, the agent of comfort that was always there for him. My body, my life, became the landscape of my son's life. I am no longer merely a thing living in the world; I am a world.

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

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

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.

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.

There truly are two kinds of people: you and everyone else.

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