Quotes from Andrew Sean Greer

Who on earth would not long to be fought for? Is this not the very heart of human existence, to be worth fighting for, worth losing everything for?

Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.

What could be more normal than to be out of place everywhere you go? What could be more American?

It is almost another kind of love, being loved. It is the same heat but from another room; it is the same sound but from a high window...

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.

That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It's nothing but protagonists. It's protagonists all the way down.

But what I am trying to tell you (and I only have a moment), what I have been trying to tell you this whole time, is that from where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad. Because it is also mine.

Either Less is an asshole, or the heart is a capricious thing.

Yes, even old American writers are dancing like it is still the eighties in San Francisco, like the sexual revolution has been won, like the war is over and Berlin has been liberated, one's own self has been liberated; and what the Bavarian in his arms is whispering is true, and everyone, everyone—even Arthur Less—is loved.

Clark always says that you can be thin or you can be happy, and, Arthur, I have already tried thin.

Why is it so impossible to believe: that we are as many headed as monsters, as many armed as gods, as many hearted as angels?

It's just that, you know how it is in some relationships, how one of them is a little more in love. Well, it's like that with friendships. Sometimes one of them thinks they're really close, closer than they are. And the other doesn't feel that way.

Around the world his pity flies, its wingspan as wide as an albatross's.

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

The garden was planted four hundred years ago, when the surrounding area was poplar. The woman makes a sweeping gesture, and he nods in appreciation. And now, Less says, it's unpoplar.

No one could rival Arthur Less for his ability to exit a room while remaining inside it.

If you clenched your right hand in a fist, that would be my San Francisco, knocking on the Golden Gate. Your little finger would be sunny downtown on the bay, and your thumb would be our Ocean Beach out on the blue Pacific. They called it the Sunset...It sat on the very edge of the continent, with fog so dense and silver you hardly ever saw a sunset in the Sunset...

an author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered

Did you love it, the rain dance every day? Only when it rained.

If only he could learn to lie so compassionately.

by now, he is well acquainted with humility. It is the one piece of luggage he has not lost.

All he wanted was to be young together and in love. Too much to ask? "Nobody gets that," she would say. "Nobody. Your problem is you're convinced you have a type." He would say of course he had a type, and she would say: "Give that up. Find someone who treats you decently.

And yet what she has said--the lying brain--this is familiar; this has happened to him. Not exactly like this, not utter terrifying madness, but he knows his brain has told him things he has traveled around the world to forget. That the mind cannot be trusted is a certainty.

From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad.