Quotes from Sarah Manguso

A woman I knew was so attached to the idea of having a terrible secret, she told me the same secret three times, each time as if for the first time.

So many things I'll never try again. People my age who are still trying—I don't know where that energy comes from. Perhaps they're unhappy. Perhaps I'm happy, but I never thought happiness would feel like this.

I'm faced at every moment with two possible lives, and I must choose one without knowing whether I want it, whether it's worth it.

Preferable to accepting one's insignificance is imagining the others hate you.

Those whose every act is praised are handicapped by adoration. They grow stunted, shrivel up, lose the impulse to continue. Praise can kill.

I didn't do it for the money , says my friend who appeared in a pornographic film. I did it for the shame .

I'm not talking about fucking; I'm talking about intimacy. One used to fade into the other, and sometimes I forget I've learned the difference.

When a student surpasses my expectations, I feel proud and betrayed.

There must be birds that sing or fly better or worse than other birds of their species; I've never noticed any. But the birds have.

Progress takes place in the dark, when you aren't trying.

In sports, failure is outwardly observable, which is to say it is a sign—look, there it is, the tennis ball that bounced twice. In the rest of life, failure is mostly complex, nuanced, secret.

People congregate according to their relative levels of luck.

Depression doesn't just steal the depressed person's capacity for joy. It throws its mantle over everything he has ever done and everything he could ever do. The depressed person dies not to save himself from the world but to save the world from himself. In this case the word depression makes clear sense; he is pressed down, forever.

Weak men who fall into positions of power are dying to give it up to anyone who will take it. The poor player would throw the ball to someone on the other team just to be rid of the worry of what to do with it, of the dread that he would have to be a man of action for a moment.

There is another kind of suffering, though, a pure agony, free from thought.

His beauty is outrageous.

No point in trying to explain myself to those who refuse to understand. I've already lost that game.

Choose one: chronic disappointment or lowering your expectations to the point where nothing can disappoint you.

I fret about my lost scarf. Then I miss my flight. The scarf is no longer a problem.

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.

First thought: How terrible that she cannot kill herself .

The quality that all last words share: the silence after.

If you want to know someone's secret, don't ask a thing. Just listen.

It's a self-obliteration that never stops and that no one notices.