Quotes from Sarah Manguso

Happiness begins to deteriorate once it is named.

Failure is good preparation for success, which comes as a pleasant surprise, but success is poor preparation for failure.

It isn't so much that geniuses make it look easy; it's that they make it look it fast.

You can choose your friends but not your friendships.

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.

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

To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget.

I knew I couldn't replicate my whole life in language.

I reread my favorite books to make sure they're still perfect, but rereading them wears away at their perfection.

Having a worst regret betrays your belief that one misstep caused all your undeserved misfortune.

She died by her own hand, but she was as brave as a soldier before a firing squad. She faced it. Whatever it was, she had been facing it for a long time.

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?

Instead of pathologizing every human quirk, we should say, By the grace of this behavior, this individual has found it possible to continue .

I wrote about myself so I wouldn't become paralyzed by rumination—so I could stop thinking about what had happened and be done with it. More than that, I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. 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 first time you love someone who doesn't love you back it seems wrong, not morally but logically, a river flowing up a mountain. How can such a feeling be wrong? You'll return to that very river, as many times as it takes.

Outsiders pretend to be insiders, and it makes them unlikable. Insiders pretend to be outsiders, and we love to play along.

On winter mornings the light spread like a watery broth over the landscape.

Slowly, slowly, I accumulate sentences. I have no idea what I'm doing until suddenly it reveals itself, almost done.

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?

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

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

They are preparing to go to war, and with so little time to waste, they say what they mean.

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 .

Being forgotten like that, entering that great and ongoing blank, seems more like death than death.