Quotes from Charles D'Ambrosio

Folks double my age and older often run down a conversation tracking a vanishing world that will, with the passing of their memory, vanish entirely.

And while of course everyone, even the most wrecked and destitute among us, has a unique personal history, the problematic nature of trying to gather information about people who've severed too many basic ties is this—that in a sense we truly have history only insofar as it's shared, and too much uniqueness really leads away from individuality to anonymity, the great sea of the forgotten.

After the onslaught of loss, both personal and historical, do we really believe a good lunch and an aesthetic perception settles the matter?

Abstract love is the nosy neighbor of abstract hate; they see right into each other's windows and they always agree on everything.

what really distinguishes us from apes is not the opposable thumb but the ability to hold in mind opposing ideas, a distinction we should probably try to preserve.

What I've collected here, of course, are just a bunch of scrappy incondite essays, not prayers, but behind each piece, animating every attempt, is the echo of a precarious faith, that we are more intimately bound to one another by our kindred doubts than our brave conclusions.

If you can love abstractly, you're only a bad day away from hating abstractly.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, my first instinct is a sort of stupid ducking motion I've learned from the movies, and I have the sure sense I'm going to be shot in the neck, where I feel particularly exposed and vulnerable.

One of the truths about suicide is that it's hardly ever about the future. It's the past the suicide can't face, and although disgrace appears to be the exception, the one instance where suicide seems to be about the future, even in Oedipus, it's her past Jocasta can't accept, once it's come to light.

We wake out of our dreams and wonder where the blood on our hands came from. Knowledge happens just about as often as shit, while innocence is probably returned to by taking yet another bite of the apple, not by pretending there never was a Fall in the first place.

Hatred's destination is boredom, and boredom is perhaps a rebellion against time; it's the finished putting up a fight with the end.

The future requires kids; without them, there's eventually no tomorrow. In time, of course, everybody runs out of tomorrows. The one thing you can say about the future, Joseph Brodsky has written, is that it won't include you. That's true, and yet the dyad of money and children plots you way out there in that world of tomorrows you don't get. Your dream, then, is of a nothingness where an investment of love lives on. You believe in a time that's not your own.

Loyalty—in its darkest form, which left so much death as its legacy to the twentieth century—rids the divided self of anxiety and guilt, so that murder smiles.

Fourier believed the world would eventually contain thirty-seven million poets equal to Homer, thirty-seven million mathematicians equal to Newton, and thirty-seven million dramatists equal to Molière—although, he admitted, these were only "approximate estimates.

Why would anyone write a poem in this wrecked world? And really, how could they? Massive doubt, failed love, shitty thoughts, empty spirit, a dead history compelling a transfixed vision, these are devastations that might overwhelm and silence anyone; and silence, for a poet, is a prison. It's where the descent hits bottom, it's where the poet either faces or does not face all the risks of failed comprehension.

Their souls may be infinitely sweet and poetic, possessed of an earnestness and bonhomie I can only envy, but their bodies, in terms of color and surface texture, resemble bridge abutments.

And so a character named Red Devil seemed a proxy voice, speaking for everybody, when he would cackle hysterically and yell out, "Manteno, 1963. I'm history!" Manteno was the state mental hospital but nothing beyond that was elaborated. To be history in America doesn't mean to be recorded, noted, added to the narrative, but precisely the opposite, to be gone, banished, left behind. To be history is to be cut from the story.

You want to find yourself in the flow of time, miraculously relieved of your irrelevance.

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. I wouldn't settle for less, yet I don't expect a whole lot more, either.

life is a bad reason for including a character in a story.

You don't really want to crash down the whole universe just to satisfy your situational unease or your incapacity to see the whole picture, do you? You don't want a life based on your failure to understand life, right?

In a curious twist, I realize I always knew TV news seemed full of shit, but I never knew it was, in fact, full of shit.

Nowadays I feel like an old-timer in terms of estrangement. I don't know what determines meaning in the city any better than these old people with their attenuating memories. Probably traffic laws, the way we still agree to agree on the detonation of stop signs.

Behind each piece, animating every attempt, is the echo of a precarious faith, that we are more intimately bound to one another by our kindred doubts than our brave conclusions.