Quotes from Sy Safransky

The sun isn't your friend. It didn't laugh at that stupid little joke. But when the business failed, when your beauty failed, when you should have gone home but spent the night, the sun kept shining.

How important to set aside time each day for the unknowable. How important to reach out: it doesn't matter that I don't yet believe.

Nothing the night said about the morning turned out to be true.

We are always mistaking the suffering of others; it's either much worse than we think or not nearly so bad.

I've cried out, and my cry has been answered--but life, with all its contradictions and ambiguities, hasn't ended there. The thirsty man drinks and gets thirsty again.

To respect people is one thing; to raise them up on a pedestal merely shows how deep a hole I've dug for myself.... True humility lies in forgiving myself for being so perplexingly human, and forgiving others for pretending they're any less human than I.

We forget what missiles our words are, how much damage we can cause with one thoughtless comment between the coffee and the toast.

In that dark chamber of my heart, where I confuse being right with being loved....

Each piece was a struggle between the editor--who insisted on the polished phrase, the line that would live forever--and the writer, an ordinary man with something ordinary to say, something sentimental and unremarkable, not quite good enough.

It's like resenting a mountain. From the very beginning they were closer. It was part of the unquestioned landscape of my childhood.

How mysteriously alone we are! How tempting to imagine that if we're loved, our loneliness will be dispelled.

if you believe, instead, that the passing years are a celebration of life, who knows what they'll bring?

My deepest gratitude goes to those we've quoted — men and women who labored long and hard to express in a few words a lifetime of experience; others who rarely wrote but paused in the middle of a busy life or a sleepless night with pen in hand, who wept and found a way to make of their suffering a gift, who laughed and found a way to make us laugh, too.

We're an odd match. Imagine Ronald Reagan and Jesse Jackson; imagine night and day. George has built nuclear reactors and believes in them fiercely. We stay away from this and other subjects the way I'd stay away from Three Mile Island. After all, I have plenty of friends who share my most impassioned opinions; we can have an orgy of agreement any day at the natural foods restaurant, over a sprout sandwich. But he's the one out here helping.

The comment is abrupt, uncalled for, yet clearly important for him to get across, a way of naming himself, turning out his pockets, the way others let on in a hurry that they know Christ, or where to get cocaine.

For what are most of our stories but cartoon versions of the past? Our personal history is the well-worn version of ourselves we've settled for, in which we come across as pitiful stick figures, "bored to death with ourselves and with the world," as don Juan said.

why, after all this sex, am I still ashamed about sex? Why, when I look at a woman, does the guilt follow so quickly upon the desire that the two have become indistinguishable?

The bed becomes your church; you pass the collection plate back and forth until you've given too much, then your poverty becomes your gift.... And though, in days or months or years to come, you'll swear you were fooling yourself, you weren't; it really happened.... above you for a moment hovered the dove.

It was easy to see that I was recreating my painful history every time I talked about it.

pretending our inner lives are a weight our bodies have been burdened with, that love is something we make for a few minutes at the end of the day.

Every revolution evaporates," said Kafka, "leaving behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy." This is true not only of governments, but of individuals: the moment of realization, of inspiration, becomes institutionalized, trivialized.

After forty years, with whatever authority comes from lived experience, I can say: You, too, can create something. You can nurture it and watch it grow.