Quotes from Andrew Sean Greer

the only addiction where the sufferer longed for anything but the desired;

Both had the fantasy; neither had carried it out.

Every book it's the hardest part-finding the way in, finding the voice to tell the story. H

He chose a Lessian costume- jeans and a cowboy shirt, only slightly wrong- and made his way south along the hillside, toward the house.

But once you've actually been in love, you can't live with "will do"; it's worse than living with yourself.

Less takes one last look at the ancient castle of mud and straw, remade every year or so as the rains erode the walls, plastered and replastered so that nothing remains of the old ksar except its former pattern. Something like a living creature of which not a cell is left of the original.

It's a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything in the world.

Less saw its marks and scars and aches not as failures of age but the opposite: the evidence, as Raymond Chandler once wrote, of "a gaudy life.

The heart will hear only one sound. A "no" will pass unnoticed, and a "good-bye" will be heard only as a deferral of hope; the future is unmarred, pushed forward by events but untouched by them because the heart sees only a perfect future with its beloved, and hears only news about that future. The rest, as they say, is noise. There is only one sound it can hear. There is only "yes.

It was nothing like the rest of the city, no hills or views or bohemians, nothing Italian or Victorian to make you take a photograph.

They knew trouble would come but expected it in degrees. Life so often arrives all of a sudden. And who knows which side you will find yourself on?

I recall how the flash of her glowing dress against my closing eyelids was like the neon glow of hotels flashing VACANCY VACANCY on a long night ride. I felt the weight of my mind hanging from a branch, pulling, pulling, and before I knew it the stem had snapped and I was falling, blind, into the void.

And Robert says nothing; he knows the absurdity of asking someone to explain love or sorrow. You can't point to it. It would be as futile, as unconveyable, as pointing at the sky and saying, "That one, that star, there.

This was the human mind made real, overshadowing even the birds in its longing to be free. Are we the only animals that must escape ourselves? Because, seeing that balloon, I could imagine my own soul, trapped in the dusty acreage of my old body, burning with a flame like this and lifting away from me, just as silvered, just as new.

Despite the gray in his beard, what I felt kept him young were the childhood hobgoblins he retained as pets: his fear of sharks, even in a swimming pool; his fear of mispronouncing "dour." He laughed each time he caught himself, and told me so.

It's easy to say something is all in your head. It's like saying a sunset is all in your eyes, she said, gesturing, pursing her mouth in small furies. It's stupid, it's nonsense. It has no brain for beauty.

he knows the absurdity of asking someone to explain love or sorrow. You can't point to it. It would be as futile, as unconveyable, as pointing at the sky and saying, "That one, that star, there.

The brain is so wrong, all the time she says, turning to the dark landscape again. Wrong about what time it is, and who people are, and where home is: wrong wrong wrong. The lying brain.

There is an old Arabic story about a man who hears Death is coming for him, so he sneaks away to Samarra. And when he gets there, he finds Death in the market, and Death says, "You know, I just felt like going on vacation to Samarra. I was going to skip you today, but how lucky you showed up to find me!" And the man is taken after all.

It feels possible that memory will never be finished with this moment. Then they step apart.

The letter is in German; the university is under the impression Arthur Less is fluent in German, and Arthur Less's publisher, who recommended him, is also under this impression. So is Arthur Less. 'With God's happiness', he writes back, 'I accept the pedestal of power', and sends it off with a flush of pleasure.

Why do today's young men insist on marrying? Was this why we all threw stones at the police, for weddings

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.

Less searches inside himself for one last bit of antipathy, one speck in the heart's pantry, but he does not even search very hard. How strange. The moment holds neither disappointment nor delight. Realizing we are no longer in love is not the heartbreaking sensation we imagine when we are in love—because it is no sensation at all. It is a realization made by a bystander.