Quotes from Sarah Manguso

Maybe the trouble is that the shape of life is elastic, that it can feel and be full at variable levels of fullness. Or maybe we're poor judges of our own lives' fullness. Or maybe the concepts of emptiness and fullness are poor metaphors for happiness, if in fact happiness is what we're talking about. ?

The affair is over, but at least things have gone somewhere, if only into oblivion. And maybe oblivion is what I wanted all along.

Some things are so horrible they need to be hidden right after they become visible. They are too horrible to be seen except very slowly, or in very small amounts. Or they are too beautiful.

In fourth grade we played hard. The fifth-grade girls played four square, too, but they didn't jeer at each other when they played, and they hit the ball gently from square to square. Their slowness seemed deliberate, as if they were dancing. Their skirts brushed slowly against their knees as they swayed. It wasn't so much that they looked different; they just looked as if they knew they were being watched.

I thought I'd die of it, but I didn't die. You can learn to eat violence. There is pleasure in not resisting. I dedicated myself to teaching my bully just how much a person can consume.

Some people care most about exhibiting how much they care.

Achieve a goal and suffer its loss.

Some people love only those they can condescend to, those they can tenderly despise.

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.

Choose one: chronic disappointment or lowering your expectations to the point where nothing can disappoint you. But consider also that you might miss feeling disappointed.

You aren't the same person after a good night's sleep as you are after a sleepless night. But which person is you?

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

On the page, these might look like the stones of a ruin, strewn by time and weather, but I was here.

I annotated my friend's book manuscript with scribbles on every page. She annotated mine with a single note: This needs to be better . She trusted that I would know what to do, and I did.

Bad art is from no one to no one.

My life felt unreal and I felt half-invested. I felt indistinct, like someone else's dream.

Interesting people aren't interested in appearing interesting

I read obituaries every day to learn what sorts of lives are available to us, to see an entire life compressed into a few column inches, to fit the whole story in my eye at once.

Hell is the moment you realize that you were ignorant of the fact, when it was true, that you were not yet ruined by desire.

I wish I could ask the future whether I should give up or keep trying. Then again, what if trying, even in the face of certain failure, feels as good as accomplishing? What if it's even better? And here we are again.

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

Another friend said, I want to write sentences that seem as if no one wrote them. The goal being the creation of a pure delivery system, without the distraction of a style. The goal being a form no one notices, the creation of what seems like pure feeling, not of what seems like a vehicle for a feeling. Language as pure experience, pure memory. I too wanted to achieve that impossible effect.

Dying young can really help an art career along. It's the careerist's ultimate paradox.

I was angry at the ghost for months, would shout at it to stop trying to scare me. Now I understand it's just lonely.