Quotes from Charles D'Ambrosio

Really, I think among the many mistakes I've made over my life, one of them was caring so much about the short story.

Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere?

My ideal life is a quiet one. I like to read, to sit still in the same chair, with the lampshade at a certain angle, alone, or with Meagan nearby, and now and then, if I'm lucky, I'll come across a lovely phrase or fine sentiment, look up from my book, and feel the harmony of some notion, the justice of it, and know that everything is there. That's life to me, those privately discovered moments.

her knees, which looked, in the faint blue light, as though they'd been carved by water from a bar of soap.

I've often thought that the unit of measure that best suits prose is the human breath

Yeah, well, I wanted to be a screenwriter, and guess what? I am one. That's the other tragedy in life.

You want to find your self in the flow of time, miraculously relieved of your irrelevance . . . I saw the pursuit of historical beauty, the yearning for those higher essences other people had staked their lives on, as the hope for some kind of voice, a chance to join the chorus. I was mad for relevance, connection, some hint that I was not alone. I started scribbling in notebooks in part just so I'd have an excuse, a reason for sitting where I sat, an alibi for being by myself.

it's nearly impossible to convey our deepest passions yet damned easy to share what's dullest and worst about ourselves.

We wake out of our dreams and wonder where the blood in our hands came from.

The canker of self-consciousness has been long in me, so like a lot of writers I not only do a thing, I see myself doing it too—it's almost like not being alone. That morning our hero skipped in his skivvies down to the shore of the sea . . . it was dark . . . the fog . . . Storytelling!

Being suicidal is really tiring. A lot of suicides are so lacking in affect and so lethargic that they aren't able to kill themselves until their mood improves—spring, for that reason, has the highest rate of what people in the business call "completed" suicides.

It's hard to kill yourself by taking Tylenol. You die from liver failure, which takes a long time...

the boy saw faces disinigrate before his eyes, faces that fell to pieces, then disappeared, leaving a hole.

What kind of damage is done to our ability to love or understand and thus fully judge one another when daily we're encouraged to forget that people are people and view them instead as so much pasteboard, scenery, clutter, generalized instances (of murder, of rape, of embezzlement, etc.)?

You all have stories, Sandy said. And we have secrets

We are more intimately bound to one another by our kindred doubts than our brave conclusions.

Alone, you're vastly outnumbered; but in the company of another, by some weird miracle of human math, the odds seem wonderfully improved in your favor.

She sighed. Ignatius, do you know what the opposite of love is? Hate, I said. Despair, Sister said. Despair is the opposite of love.

The poem's not fragile. You can beat on it. It's got good traction. Paraphrased, its four stanzas go like this: 1. You're fucked. 2. We're all fucked. 3. Why? 4. Let's eat lunch.

I wish I could explain things better, to make you understand. But I can't. It's just too hard to find the right word.

I stood there, slightly behind Mrs. Gurney. I was getting tired, but sitting down in the sand might indicate to her that where we were was O.K.

Everything died off and disappeared in that silent way only an eon can absorb and keep secret.

As long as you could fall farther you distinguished yourself from the fallen. Loss reinstated possibility, but possibility without hope. And perhaps this explains how all of us blithely

Alone, you're vastly outnumbered; but in the company of another, by some weird miracle of human math, the odds seem wonderfully improved in your favor.