Quotes from Sarah Manguso

But it felt so good, I kept doing it.

Not every narrative is an arc. The universe, for example, just keeps expanding.

If you insist that people witness your beauty, they'll watch it closely until it's gone.

Some people always give excellent gifts. It is a talent. A gift. Unteachable.

I like to visit with the exhausted girl who once was me

I'm stuck in a waiting room with the TV on the same channel all day, and I'm never called in for my appointment.

The most fervent kiss of my life was less than five seconds long more than ten years ago with someone else's husband. It still hasn't quite worn off.

What fails to kill me will kill me eventually.

The full moon is saying 'O!' But the sun is silent

I want to shed my fears one by one until there is nothing left of me.

If you go to Paris, you won't find Paris; you'll find yourself in Paris. Ditto anywhere else. You might as well stay home.

Once you've traveled far enough from where you began, it's impossible to reconcile the present with the past.

There are good fathers and bad fathers, good sons and bad sons, good husbands and bad ones, but great friends are all alike. We choose them and keep them. We aren't bound to them by anything but love.

I tried to record each moment, but time isn't made of moments; it contains moments. There is more to it than moments.

Some people wore their difference honestly, but my parents were liars, illegitimate Waitsfielders, their off-whiteness discovered only after the paint had dried. By the time I was born, the house had faded to the color of dirty snow.

I closed my own eyes for a moment and recovered, but incompletely. I can't forget how close insanity is, how easy it might be to drive off the shoulder of the road into a place where no one would ever find me.

I go to another room, hoping someone will notice me, but I stay silent out of loyalty or fear.

I look at young people and marvel at their ignorance of what's coming, and the old people look at me.

It's impossible to fail if one doesn't know how the end should look. And it's impossible to succeed. But it's possible to enjoy.

Giving up and submitting to suffering looks the same as achieving total detachment and surpassing the Buddha.

I hadn't remembered that in decades. That particular quiet.

I used to avoid people when I was afraid I loved them too much.

In the morning I wake amid fading scenes of different characters, different settings, all restatements of that first desire, a ghost who haunts me as the beauty he was at sixteen.

But to pay attention is to love everything.