Quotes from Andrew Sean Greer

Is it perhaps a radiation, an emanation of this innocence, this guilelessness, grown white-hot?

It is a bad musical, but like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do it's job perfectly well.

The sun is slowly dying, the spiral arm spreading, the molecules drifting apart second by second towards our inevitable heat death- shouldn't we all wail to the stars?

Glamorous, intelligent, resilient, bracingly direct, and prone to obscenities, Zohra seems like the kind of woman who would run an international spy ring.

No, no, I said. No, no, Nathan, not because of you. It's something ... I can't explain it to you. I've seen myself from all sides. That's a rare thing to do. I've seen you, too. I understand things, I think. What I wanted to say was: I understand that it wasn't that you didn't want to be with me anymore, but you didn't want to be yourself anymore, the one you were with me.

It's true things can go on till you die. And people use the same old table, even though it's falling apart and it's been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother's. That's how towns become ghost towns. It's how houses become junk stores. And I think it's how people get old.

But it is a rule of life, alas, that nobody is kidding.

He can see the expression on his face, and what is one to do with pity? Is it all just useless Confederate money?

years; they had exchanged just one letter, one glance in

What magnetic force draws us to scenes of pain, and words that wound us? You have seen this, I told myself as I marched along to that apartment. You have seen this already, you've lived through this, spare yourself

You could almost have it both ways—you could forgive this Larry, struggling with his cane and Wanda and harbors and restaurants and shopping, his cancer and gays and Jews and assholes, forgive him and let him die forgiven. And still never forgive the one who left.

But heartbreak—how can you avoid it except to renounce love entirely? In the end, that is the only solution Arthur Less could find.

He kisses -- how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can only use the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you

When you were a little girl, madam," he said, gesturing to her, "was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?

But he can no more feel sorry for Swift—

but can one "get" an edge any more than one can "get" a sense of humor? Or do you fake it, the way a humorless businessman memorizes jokes and is considered "a riot," leaving parties before he runs out of material?

The problem in the world is that we aren't kind to one another. It's kindness and human spirit that drives us. We have one another. That's all we have. We must celebrate them. Remember that. I don't care who you love, but if you love someone…if you love someone, you have to love them every day. You have to choose them every day.

Just one small thing had changed, such a small thing really. What difference could it make, the era in which we are born?

blame. I was as terrified as anyone, knowing

I'm dog-eared as a book")

It's so unlikely to be alive, isn't it? The right temperature, and gravity, the right atoms combining at the precise right moment, you'd think it would never happen.

For while our middle-aged author would probably consider himself a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, certainly never a protagonist, the truth of existence has not quite pierced his soul: That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: Itss nothing but protagonists. It's protagonists all the way down.

My favorite movie as a child was The Wizard of Oz, and I knew that it began with gray clouds just like these. Every time any black-and-white scene with gray clouds appeared on television, I would clap my hands with glee. No number of disappointments could dissuade me; I always thought it was The Wizard of Oz. And life is actually so threaded with hidden enchantment that, one time, it was.

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.