Quotes from Andrew Sean Greer

The villain raises first one eyebrow, then the other. "When I was young, all I wanted to read were pretentious little books. Camus and Tournier and Calvino. If it had a plot, I hated it." "You remain this way," Luisa chides, and he

I have never ridden a camel. I have taught a high school English class for the best part of a decade, and graded homework every night, and woken up early in the morning to plan my lessons, and read and reread Shakespeare, and sat through enough conferences and meetings for even those in Purgatory to envy me.

Why this endless need for a man as a mirror? To see the Arthur Less reflected there?

We know there's no love of your life. Love isn't terrifying like that. It's walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it's doing taxes, it's cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings. It's having an ally in life. It's not fire, it's not lightning.

Arturo says, "There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very slow road…to your final place of rest." He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men.

Why did he always assume Mexico City would be like Phoenix on a smoggy day? Why did no one tell him it would be Madrid

A game to write a persuasive opening sentence for a book they have never read (this is difficult, as these diligent students have read everything) leads to a chilling start to Woolf's The Waves: I was too far out in the ocean to hear the lifeguard shouting, "Shark! Shark!

No one has ever been hopelessly in love with me. No, Carlos says. You always gave them hope, didn't you?

Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young." "Yes! It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.

He is shown to a car as small, bland, and white as a hospital dessert

It's that they've survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold

She is talking about the birds, awakening in harmony and bedding down in discord.

Life so often arrives all of a sudden. And who knows which side you will find yourself on?

It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.

THERE ALMOST HAS to be a heaven. If other worlds surround us, just a lightning bolt away, then what would stop us from slipping there? If love has left us, well, then there is a world where it has not. If death has come, then there is a world where it has been kept at bay.

No one could rival Arthur Less for his ability to exit a room while remaining inside it. He sat, and his mind immediately left me behind.

We are all having different experiences.

A mediocre review or careless slight can no longer harm him, but heartbreak, real true heartbreak, can pierce his thin hide and bring out the same shade of blood as ever. How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting? Perhaps because he finds fresh sources for

It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.

Honey, I don't know what happened in your life, but I am so so sorry," and gives him a lilac-scented embrace. Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I'm just a homosexual at a Broadway show.

What had Freddy mean, the bravest person I know? For Less, it is a mystery. Name a day, name an hour, in which Arthur Less was not afraid. Of ordering a cocktail, taking a taxi, teaching a class, writing a book. Afraid of these and almost everything else in the world. Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.

Mescal turns out to be a drink that tastes as if someone has put their cigarette out in it.

For a fifty-year-old man, the boredom of lying convalescent in bed is rivaled only by sitting in church

one could sit back with a bag of popcorn and watch the romances and comedies of his mind projected onto his face, and the lenses of his tortoiseshell glasses swirled with his thoughts like the iridescent membranes of soap bubbles.