Quotes from Allan Gurganus

I was 16 before I met another passionate collector. One summer, I visited England; a new friend took me calling on his dotty, brilliant old aunt. She occupied a quaint house in Kent. Its walls were lined with glass-fronted cases full of what? Ancient shoe buckles.

There's a kind of ear music . . . a rhythmic synchronicity which creates a kind of heartbeat on the page.

Collections collect collectors. It doesn't work the other way around. A certain object misses its own kind and communicates that to some person who surrounds it with rhyming items; these become at first a quorum, then a selective, addictive madness.

Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape.

Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.

The tree feels splintery, nasty to my touch; it feels Floridian, more reptile than vegetable, more stucco than stone. I do loathe this state, their Elba.

Spring is the earth forgiving itself.)

Truth always leaves a pleasure asking questions.

He, the true writer, is the department store dummy at the very center of the whole establishment, the one left alone on display all night, a price tag stapled to every piece of clothing they've yanked onto him, binoculars and frog flippers included. He is the neutral, generic human form, the gray center who must always assume disguises — in order to be seen and, therefore, to feel himself.

I started thinking of my absentee diamond. My thumb and little finger kept reaching for their pet and sidekick.

We'd die here, old together, safe with each other's secrets. We were each other's juvenilia

Unlike her, nothing had yet happened to him.

Imagine how titanic an echo chamber this great city would seem without the noise of eve none of mine. A huge bronze bell deprived of one hidden small iron clapper, its sole reason for being, its single means of song.

Fifteen, that's the age when the only world event that counts is whatever mood you're in that day.

The visit has commenced. The box step, three-quarter waltz time. No fast moves or sudden stops.

The chances of achieving literary performance are, to the decimal point, the odds against becoming fully human. That means one hundred and fifty million to one. Which means one hundred and fifty million in one.

Growth pains already," Mom said under a sigh pancake-sized.

Into one docile river, I heaved the non-word Shadowlawn. Lettering upward, cheerful as a duck, the log did not sink but happily bobbed elsewhere as if seeking finer property to describe.

All Mrs. B's furniture was missing limbs or spines or cushions—bricks and broomsticks were busy being everything's crutch—but the room looked beautiful anyhow. Especially if you squinted some.

Seemed our house stirred up troubles enough to keep a radio soap show in daily episodes forever.

Once you harden, the arteries do.

All their lives they've said how Folks that don't Work should Starve. Now they can't work but they ain't ready for what they been wishing on the shiftless of all races.