Quotes from John Jeremiah Sullivan

Every unhappy family is periodically ransacked by joy.

It's just amazing the lengths people go to, to be thought of as special.

maybe the greatest gift marriage gives us is the chance to fantasize, to imagine that there's more to life than there actually is, and it accomplishes this by assuming responsibility for all the misery and dullness that we would otherwise equate with life itself.

invisibility is a luxury.

He told me that in the hallways at Versailles, there hung a faint, ever-so-faint smell of human excrement, "because as the chambermaids hurried along a tiny bit would always splash from the pots." Many years later I realized that he was half-remembering a detail from the court of Louis XV, namely that the latrines were so few and so poorly placed at the palace, the marquesses used to steal away and relieve themselves on stairwells and behind the beautiful furniture...

Sounding frank, honest, and sincere is, of course, a rhetorical strategy in itself, known from ancient literature as parrhesia. It's often employed by liars.

No one is more surprised than I that I turned out to be who I am.

We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into.

Freaky things happen all the time in the world. I suppose everything has to happen for the first time at some point.

Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think.

The initial research will be very indiscriminate. I do a lot of reading, buy a stack of books and read and digest them, and then I start doing phone interviews and archival research and then the travelling.

I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.

At GQ, there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want.

A good writer wants from us — or has no right to ask more than — intelligence, good faith and time.

As the planet warms, evolution speeds. We've known this for a long time.

Ireland starts for me with the end of 'The Dead,' which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.

The city of Cork - the urban center, where all the shops and bars and everything are - is actually an island, a river island.

I don't read a lot of books that were published after 1755. One thing about having friends in New York who belong to the literary world, however, is that I have a steady stream of books coming to the house.

I want to stay in touch with what I have in common with my subjects, with the places where are equally implicated with whatever is wrong with the culture.

when you're a young adult, the apparently infinite multiplicity of possible choices—possible jobs, possible friends, possible cities, possible girlfriends or boyfriends—can sometimes fool you into thinking you have an infinite amount of time to try out everything. But once you're married, you've significantly cut down the options, and it suddenly makes your life feel shorter—like now there's a direct line between you and your own death.

The problem with marriage, we all know, is the endlessness of it. Plenty of things we do will have long-term repercussions, but in what other situation do you promise to do something for the rest of your life?

Saturday you might see your dad in a T-shirt, your brother might be asked if he'd like to throw a ball around, and from a corner of the lawn you might sit and watch, wild with the wrongness of being a girl, wild with stoppered grace.

When certain individuals feel severely threatened—emotionally, financially, physically—the lights on the horizon they use to orient themselves in the world might easily wink out. Life can then become a series of fear-driven decisions and compulsive acts of self-protection. People start to separate what is deeply troubling in their lives from what they see as good.

I almost always have a notebook with me... a notebook is a nice thing to have in a room, the same way it's nice to have a musical instrument in a stand. .. it makes the household gods happy.