Quotes from Sarah Manguso

Of course language isn't enough.

It's interesting to watch my friend speak carefully about what he thinks I'll find interesting.

We married other people, had children. I still can't believe it. I might never believe it.

After a friend dies young, the story of her life becomes the exposition to a tragedy. This is the central problem of biography.

It is nothing less than sabotage.

Most of those who tried to be the best failed. So I tried to be the second-best, and sometimes I succeeded.

I asked my parents to buy me a Lite Brite like the one I played with in school, and they did. It was the only toy I had that plugged in, that was bought new... I couldn't reconcile it with the other things in my room and in our house, and I can'r remember every playing with it. It was mine, but I didn't feel worthy of using it. It wasn't my turn to use it yet, not when it was still brand-new.

Turn forty and suddenly you're too old to die tragically young.

I had no character to speak of, no loyalty to anything. I made fun of anyone, given the chance, just as my parents did at home, talking about me, talking about their closest friends.

We were inert targets at which to aim their certainty, and even if we knew they were wrong, the men couldn't even imagine not being right. So many of them would never know what was actually true.

My own girlhood felt like something from 1650 even when it was happening. The little parties, kindnesses done by friends, the light as I walked home from school. Pine needles. I spent those days feeling half-there, not quite committed to that life.

What's curious to me now is that I didn't know at the time that I was suffering, so deeply involved was I in being saved.