Quotes from Brian Morton

So much of human life is animal life: we respond to each other as animals.

So you can keep going. You can stay young. There's no inevitable law of diminishment: everyone who fades fades for his own reason.

Subtlety and indirection are important tools, but you can't scale the highest peaks with these tools alone.

It's foolish to speak of your happiness before you're sure you have it.

A man can't understand how a woman feels--how she can offer up her entire life to him. The man thinks she's bringing him a burden. He doesn't understand that she's trying to give him a gift.

they had lived, they'd lived intensely. But no matter how deeply you live, it comes to this in the end: one of you will be gone and the other will be in mourning.

There are certain situations in which you can't convey what you mean. Words don't always work.

His kisses were too rote; they were assembly-line kisses. She wanted complex kisses; she wanted each kiss to be a conversation.

It's probably true that you're forging your own character during every minute of every day, with every decision you make, but there are some moments in which this is more clear than in others.

Life takes place in restaurants.

It wasn't that she wanted to seduce him—not literally. But flirting was a pleasure, and flirting with intelligent people—male or female—was one of the supreme pleasures of life.

People, Florence thought as she put on her shoes. What do I need them for again?

Take the risk that you'll end up regretting your speech, because it's better than regretting your silence.

What appalled Schiller about these libraries was that they featured nothing off the beaten track: no tattered paperbacks; no evidence of distinctive personal interests; no tokens of long intellectual detours passionately explored.

The feminist girls she knew at Oberlin, her roommate among them, were the kind of people who made you feel bad for liking what you liked. Sometimes when Emily was tired or blue she liked to watch "When Harry Met Sally", or "Love Actually", or old episodes of "Friends", and at Oberlin she'd had to wait until her roommate had gone out or fallen asleep.

The idea that there were documents and recordings that couldn't be found online had never really occurred to her.

But Ariel felt sure that every moment is indestructible, and that somewhere in the universe, tucked away in some hidden fold of time, their moment together still endured. Somewhere she was still a young girl, hurled about by life, confessing her troubles, and he was a calm older man, listening to her as her father couldn't listen and telling her to have courage.

I've become one of those horrible women who goes around saying things like, 'Now that I am old, I shall wear more purple.

She was thinking that she was foolish to hope that someday, if she found the right path, she would be continuously happy. No one is that fortunate. The moments of beauty, the moments when you feel blessed, are only moments; but memory and imagination, treasuring them, can string them together like the delicate glories on the necklace her father had given her. Everything else passes away; that which you love remains. She had to believe this, even if she wasn't sure it was true.

We congratulate ourselves on having abandoned our vices, when it is they who have abandoned us.

One of the sad little secrets of the writing life is that it's become like the movie business, where a movie has to "open big"; if a book hasn't caught anybody's interest in the first two weeks of its life, it's not going to.

These friends were his anchor; they kept him from floating off into the uncharted realms of his own self-regard.

He was a muted egomaniac—he tried to keep his grandiosity under cover—but an egomaniac nonetheless.

And we were driving there with Florence and Stella. I was complaining about having to go all the way up to Connecticut, and you said, 'Look at it this way: we have two obligations to our old friends. We have to go to their weddings and we have to go to their funerals. With George, we're halfway home.