Quotes from Andrew Sean Greer

Where did the genius come from? Where did it go? Like allowing another lover into the house to live with you, someone you'd never met but whom you knew he loved more than you. Poetry every day. A novel every few years. Something happened in that room, despite everything; something beautiful happened. It was the only place in the world where time made things better.

New York is a city of eight million people, approximately seven million of whom will be furious when they hear you were in town and didn't meet them for an expensive dinner, five million furious you didn't visit their new baby, three million furious you didn't see their new show, one million furious you didn't call for sex, but only five actually available to meet you.

Some accidental frequency in the siren had lit a gene like a flare in their rib cages, freeing them - for what greater freedom could there be than to forget your home?

There is nothing like that for the boys who did not go to war; they were not soldiers, and did not die. They are burned out of history, for nothing blazes quite as hot as shame. There are no bills in circulation. But I have signed their names to this story. I have signed all of our names. How else will we be remembered?

And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid.

THERE ALMOST HAS to be a heaven, so there can be a place where all things meet. Where time folds in, a lifted tablecloth after the meal, and gathers all the scattered crumbs of life.

Look, you: there are enough stars for everyone tonight, and among them shine the satellites, those counterfeit coins.

It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well. By the end, Arthur Less is in tears, sobbing in his seat, and he thinks he has been sobbing quietly until the lights come up and the woman seated beside him turns and says, "Honey, I don't know what happened in your life, but I am so so sorry," and gives him a lilac-scented embrace.

Fate, that glockenspiel, will turn upon the hour.

They might have done, many of them. So many people will do. But once you've actually been in love, you can't live with will do; it's worse than living with yourself.

Whenever Vincent pays a visit, Less prays for Jesus Christ Our Savior to extinguish his Libido

Too wistful. Too poignant. These walk-around-town-books, these day-in-the-life stories. I know writers love them. But I think it's hard to feel bad for this Swift fellow of yours. I mean, he has the best life of anyone I know.

Just for the record, happiness is not bullshit. - Arthur Less (character)

Acting almost on a species memory, he runs forward, the glove before him.

Life so often arrives all of a sudden.

Why didn't he say yes?

Back then, these journeys all seemed as random as the stars in the sky; only now can he see the zodiac turning above his life. Here, rising, comes the Scorpion.

I feel like I just understood how to be young." "Yes! It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.

There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very slow ride... to your final place of rest. He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men. Less understands: he has been assigned a poet.

How awful for the string of inequities to be brought out in his mind, that useless rosary, so he can finger again those memories:

He goes to the Musée Carnavalet and admires the decor of crumbled palaces restored, room by room

How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting?

You cannot call it a guilty pleasure when the lights go down and the curtain goes up, when the adolescent heart begins to beat along with the orchestra, not when you feel no guilt. And

I think the saddest thing in the world is a twenty-five-year-old talking about the stock market.