Quotes from Brian Morton

Even in your smallest gestures, you express your sense of honor, if you have one.

The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories. Nothing has meaning in itself: all the objects in the world would be shards of bare mute blankness, spinning wildly out of orbit, if we didn't bind them together with stories.

You seize your freedom in a spirit of rebelliousness, exuberance, defiant joy. But to live that choice -- over the weeks and months and years to come -- requires different qualities. It requires that you turn hard, turn rigid. Because it isn't a choice that the world encourages, you have to wear a suit of armor to defend it.

The river was so blue it seemed to be breathing.

Every choice we make is either a grwoth choice or a fear choice.

We wish for a symmetry of feeling, but we rarely get it. It is painful to be the one who loves more, and painful to be the one who loves less.

it isn't a bad thing to remember that you have some wildness in you, that not every inch of your soul is honorable and responsible and presentable and tamped and tamed.

She loved to return to the world of the book, a workd in which people were willing to let go of everything in order to follow their passions.

The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories.

Even in your smallest gestures, you express your sense of honor, if you have one.

an artist doesn't really need a great deal of experience. One heartbreak can produce many novels. But you have to have a heart that can break.

What matters, finally, isn't finding the kind of person you think you should love. What matters is finding someone you feel more alive with.

a piece of writing is only worth doing if you're a different person at the end of the process than you were at the beginning.

To sit across the table and talk with someone you love is itself a complex engagement, with an exhaustingly subtle flow of information; to go to bed with someone--to carry your conversation into the realm of the body, a realm of insecurity and fear as well as pleasure--was always fraught with the sad evidence of how difficult it is to understand another person and make yourself understood.

The parasite of art, the virus of art, never ceases to gnaw awat at your brain, never ceases to torture you with the knowledge that whatever you're doing could be done more beautifully, more powerfully, more stirringly, more disturbingly, more deeply.

Knowledge is always a good thing, even when it makes us unhappy

Without her glasses Vivian did look a little frightening. She had tight sinewy strappy muscles and a face that was hardened and almost brutal - a face that might have been chiseled by a sculptor who had fallen out of love with the idea of beauty.

I know it sounds strange but it's true. I mean that you're open to life. You're open to being surprised. You're open to being changed by life. Most of us lose that quality in our twenties. I don't know how you've managed to hang on to it, but you have." The music was loud, and the people were loud.

Maybe a man can change. It helps when you've been injured, when you've been dislodged from the complacent routines of your life. Sometimes it takes an injury to make you see what you share with others.

The moments of beauty, the moments when you feel blessed, are only moments; but memory and imagination, treasuring them, can string them together... Everything else passes away; that which you love remains.

The thing is to let life assault you, make yourself as defenseless as you can. If it bruises you, don't protest. Love your fate.

A trip to the market in the morning to buy bread, an afternoon spent reading in a cafe—nothing was routine; a strange place helped you find the poetry in everyday life.

You understood me; you helped me understand myself. If reading a book is a naked encounter between two people, I have known you nakedly for years.

life brings you everything at once. You can be in misery because of the misery of your daughter at the same time as you're exhilarated by a new romance, a romance that feels like the first act of a new life.