Quotes from Susan Minot

Hope is better than misery, he said. Or despair. Hope belongs in the same box as despair. Hope is not so bad, he said. At least despair has truth to it.

The odd feeling comes which you know may not be right but which still inhabits you: I belong below people.

Most people when you get up close are not more in focus, but less.

When she'd heard the news on the phone it had torn a hole in her and she went immediately hard and did not cry. If she let herself feel, the part of her that was left would be riddled wigth holes and there'd be nothing left. She had not, since then, shed a tear. Her body shut down; to allow feeling would sink her

So she attended classes which were throughly altered now, as. if a water wash had brushed over everything, streaking lines, and pulling the color out. Grief turned out to be slow moving. Situations which at another time would be anxious-making were far less so now. What did anything matter? What could possibly be worrisome. She would therefore, have been less nervous than usual to walk with Mr. Tower to his car.

You think you are done with an experience once it is over and it is set into some version in a story. And there it will sit. But if you return to the experience many years later, because you are, say, urged by a movement in the culture to re-examine the treatment of women, an examination which seems to come every fifty years or so before it fades away again, then go, you might discover new details waiting for you, unnoticed.

All day I was surrounded by earnest men with furrowed brows who read Balzac in the mail-room. The more jovial ones delivered double entendres with a wry, jaded air, not coming out from behind their desks. Sex was something other people did. Sometimes the writers swept in with an exotic air, smelling faintly of alcohol, flushed and distracted. If they noticed you the first time, they would forget the next time they came in.

I would have fallen in love with you anywhere.

When a person you love moves by you with flat eyes that will not see you, it is a shock to believe it.

I first travelled to Africa at the end of 1996 and was immediately captivated. I had planned on a three-week trip, and I ended up staying two months.

I love 'Anna Karenina.' It's in the top five books on my list. Tolstoy is unsurpassed in combining the grand with the trivial, that is, the small details which make up life.

I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, 'Maybe I'll go back for my writing.'

When I was in my teens and twenties, I could see friends expressing how radical they were, and I envied them, the way they lived, the way they dressed. Maybe there is a part of me that is reserved, even in rebellion.

There is no good reason. Don't waste your life waiting for good reasons...You'll wait and wait.

I would have fallen in love with you anywhere.

She thought of how much people changed you. It was the opposite of what you always heard, that no one could change a person. It wasn't true. It was only through other people that one ever did change.

Boy poison - a boy's kisses were like a poison, which infected you and after you were exposed you craved more, like an addict.

Hope is a terrible thing, she said. Is it? Yes, it keep you living in another place, a place which doesn't exist. For some people it's better than where they are. For many it's a relief. From life, she said. A relief from life? Is that living? Some people don't have a choice. No and that's awful for them. Hope is better than misery, he said. Or despair. Hope belongs in the same box as despair. Hope is not so bad, he said. At least despair has truth to it.

After she was gone there would be no one who knew the whole of her life. She did not even know the whole of it! Perhaps she should have written some of it down...but really what would have been the point in that? Everything passed, she would too. This perspective offered her an unexpected clarity she nearly enjoyed, but even with this new clarity the world offered no more explanation for itself than it ever had.

She] felt as if she were both a stranger to herself and more herself than she'd ever been.

Did people ever stop changing? They surprised you with fresh pain. Sometimes they surprised you with happiness, but the pain was the sharper surprise. There was no way to protect yourself from it. People could always change and always hurt you. Of course it went in the other direction too, you could hurt them when you didn't intend it and that too was out of your control.

it occurred to her how some people continued through no design of one's own to be in one's life while others might initially enter in a sort of blaze and seem to change everything but then might not stay around.

I learned that if you love a boy you are o longer free. The boy may become more important than your own self and if it is so, you will find trouble there. The first time you are hurt in your heart, you do not forget the lesson. It stays forever.

I walk to think and not to think. When walking I remember things that are important to me. I walk to forget. I have yet to set out on a walk in low spirits and return feeling worse than I did when I left the door. A change occurs between the fate and the porch, walking lifts the weight off the heart. Or as the writer Jim Harrison says, "When you're out of sorts, walk a hundred miles.