Quotes from Brian Morton

The primary human need, he decided—stronger than the need for food or sex or love—is the need for recognition, the need to make a mark in the world.

For years all the people in his life had been people he'd known for a long time;

The Refusal of the Keys: it seemed like something from mythology, from medieval legend.

You have an unfinished quality that in a person of your age is an achievement.

I regretted it. But it can't be avoided. A writer has to use everything he has. If you want to write, you have to be willing to be a son of a bitch sometimes.

You travel side by side through the life you share, and you come to think you know each other all too well. But if each of us enters the afterlife alone, and is asked to give an accounting, asked to speak of how one lived and what one lived for, then the accounting Daniel gave of his life might involve trials of which she knew nothing, sufferings of which he'd never spoken and that had left no outer mark.

But his life consisted, for the most part, of writing and reading. He wrote during the day, read at night, went to bed early, and did the same thing the next day.

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.

Maybe, she thought, it was because it was still too new. It's foolish to speak of your happiness before you're sure you have it.

Heather resented it that this woman was his daughter. How does a writer of the most subtle, serious fiction end up with a daughter who watches Oprah? I'd be a better daughter for him than she is.

She had a moment of engulfing sadness about this, about the way that even when we're living through tragedy, the language we reach for, the only language available to us, is secondhand.

It was hard for him to insist, because it hurt her, and because he knew it would drive her away. But he couldn't string a woman along anymore. He felt like a rat, but a rat at peace with itself.

What you are he said, is a complicated girl with simple needs. You need your books and time to read, and you need a few friends, and you need someone not to take care of you, but to care for you. If you have all those things, you will always be all right.

Why was it that at every grown-up function, the exact same conversation had to take place? Sometimes Emily felt as if she could hand out scripts, to save everybody the trouble of thinking, except that there would be no point, because they weren't thinking--they were just saying the same things they'd said the last time.

Fear of any undertaking, to her way of thinking, was usually a reason to go ahead with it.

She knew that this relationship wasn't as important to him as it was to her. If he was being honest he'd probably admit that she was the second most important thing in his life right now.

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.

He was like a fireman of intellectual life, rescuing frail forgotten thinkers from the burning building of time.

But whenever Heather felt uncertain about whether to do something, she did it. She had decided long ago that you never learn anything by holding back.

When she was little, her father, just before he went to bed, used to check his watch and ask in surprise, "How did it get so late so early?

Schiller had no illusions about the scale of his own achievement, but he had tried, through art, to bring a little more beauty, a little more tolerance, a little more coherence into the world, and now he felt he had earned the right to look back at the statue with an unembarrassed eye.

Maybe there was nothing to be done but wait out his adolescence, and hope that at the end of it all he might be a person who would want to talk to you.

And the trick to making anyone happy, and making yourself happy in the bargain, is to bring them not only what they ask for, but to bring them extras.

If you really listen, you find that most people tell you their life stories as soon as they meet you. Ariel, clearly, was another boring forty-year-old obsessed with her "biological clock.