Quotes from Andrew Sean Greer

The Russian novelist pulls his lush eyebrows together like the parts of a modular sofa.

What if one day you meet someone, Arthur, and it feels like it could never be anyone else? Not because other people are less attractive, or drink too much, or have issues in bed, or have to alphabetize every fucking book or organize the dishwasher in some way you just can't live with. It's because they aren't this person.

And then, inevitably, one day—it's gone. And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid.

Her head jerked around. It's so unlikely to be alive, isn't it? The right temperature, and gravity, the right atoms combining at the precise moment, you'd think it would never happen. She stood looking at a painting with a hand to her cheek, then watched the cat making its way across the sofa toward the bird. Life, it's so unlikely, she said, then turned to me again. It's so much better than we think, isn't it?

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 use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you. There are some men that have never been kissed like that there are some men who discover after Arthur Less, that they never will be again.

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.

Why the gay press doesn't review your books? They don't? They don't, Arthur. Don't pretend you haven't noticed. You're not in the cannon.

The next day, Less hears Dr. Balk is down with a mysterious illness. In class, two young women quietly faint at their desks; as they collapse, their twin ponytails fly up like the tails of frightened deer. Less is beginning to see a pattern.

Strange to be almost 50, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.

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.

Strange to be almost 50, 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.

Was he testing to see how elastic love could be? Was he simply a man who had gladly given his youth to a man in midlife, and now nearing midlife himself, wanted back the fortune he squandered.

How does Less get the world so wrong? Over and over again. Where is the exit for moments like this?

And Less feels it swelling up within him, the phrase he does not want to say and yet, somehow, by the cruel checkmate logic of conversation, is compelled to say: "Thank you.

Like a landmark, a pyramid-shaped stone or a cypress, that we assume will never move. So we can find our way home. And then, inevitably, one day—it's gone. And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid

Boredom is essential for writers. It is the only time they get to write.

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

Ninety years old and chatttering, chattering away as if the cure for his inability to speak Japanese were the application of more Japanese.

chilling start to Woolf's The Waves: I was too far out in the ocean to hear the lifeguard shouting, "Shark! Shark!

I know I'm out of your life / But the day that I die / I know you are going to cry

Will Less ever again be so beloved?

And then, inevitably, one day it's gone. And we realise we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable in the world. That the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure. Like the playing pieces of a game and cannot move of their own accord. That they are held in place by our need for them. By our love. How stupid.

They might have done, many of them. So many people will do. But once you've actually been in love, you can't live with "will do"; it's worse than living with yourself.

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.