Quotes from Sarah Manguso

I never joined Facebook because I want to preserve my old longings. And also yours.

I wish I could ask the future whether I should give up or keep trying.

Horror is terror that stayed the night.

In this way I can mourn him without having to think about him.

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

Weak men who fall into positions of power are dying to give it up to anyone who will take it.

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.

My least favorite received idea about writing is that one must find one's voice, as if it's there inside you, ready to be turned on like a player piano. Like character, its very existence depends on interaction with the world.

Others were in love. Desire abandoned them all.

I wasn't afraid of him; I was afraid of my feeling. It was more powerful than God. If we'd ever spoken it might have burned the whole place down.

The background of my life was white and angry, with violent weather.

Details aren't automatically interesting.

Death will reveal what you otherwise would have finished. Also what you never would have finished. I found the notes for a book a woman had been working on for thirty years: sixteen pages.

There are two kinds of people: those who can't perform the act when they're sad and those who perform it only to escape sadness.

The dark owns everything, but our sun comes out often enough that we think the universe is half dark, half light.

When the worst comes to pass, the first feeling is relief.

For just a moment, with great effort, I could imagine my will as a force that would not disappear but redistribute when I died, and that all life contained the same force, and that I needn't worry about my impending death because the great responsibility of my life was to contain the force for a while and then relinquish it.

I made so many mistakes on purpose just to get them out of the way.

Talking with someone who reveals nothing, I hear myself madly filling the emptiness with information about myself.

One cannot convince another to love anything or anyone.

I write in defense of the beliefs I fear are least defensible.

It's an expression of grief for an original loss.

People who live that long aren't impulsive. They protect a little ember and say just a little bit too cold all their lives.

We hide in plain sight, in our bodies.