Quotes from Charles Baxter

game of deducing a person's character from that person's appearance is an old pastime with racists and with those who seek an advantage over the poor or the ugly, the disabled, or any underrepresented minority.

Her recovery was sometimes referred to as "a miracle," more miraculous than mine, but I don't believe in miracles, just the force of compassion, which under certain circumstances can bring the dead to life.

As Nietzsche says about Christians, you can tell from their faces that they don't enjoy doing what they do. Fiction writers cluster in the unlit corners of the room, silently observing everybody, including the poets, who are usually having a fine time in the center spotlight, making a spectacle of themselves as they eat the popcorn and drink the beer and gossip about other poets.

He gave the impression of being clean and dry as though he had been pressed between two large blotters which had absorbed all his vital juices.

and behind them the quivering mucosity of her tongue.

So bleary with jet lag that she could not sleep or make any sense in conversation, and feeling that her brain was a haunted house in which bats flew randomly from one attic beam to another

He had a particularly deliberate way of speaking that made him sound as if he had thought up his sentences several minutes ago and was only now getting around to saying them.

Do you read, Mr. Quinn?" he asked. "Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist.

Gurov, discovers that the most important features of life that you want to talk about cannot be spoken of in polite society.

Es lo único que voy a decir sobre este tema por ahora. Como dice Chloé, hay cosas a las que más vale no darles muchas vueltas. Si quieres leer algo, lee el espacio blanco que queda en esta página. Soy yo, el que está en ese espacio.

Al llevarme a casa, Harry me dijo —¿cómo podía no saberlo?—que Jackson Pollock se había rebanado la punta de su dedo meñique a los siete años. ¡Siete! Jesucristo. Ni siquiera mi dolor era original

He had had, he felt, a lucky life of good fortune and privilege, and if the sun was setting on people like him, middle-class white guys, well, okay.

You know, few people really want to become individuals," he says. "People claim that they do, but they don't. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that's not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.

Weather is so nineteenth-century in its effects

All that caring about what happens next.' He waited. 'Now nothing happens next.

randomly around her plate. I said later: at least no ham, no pork, no shrimp mousse, no trayf. But Harry, she said, veal to me is like a frozen scream.

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.

In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.

There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.

As my mother once said to me, 'They're quite crazy, dear – men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.

The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.