Quotes from Andrew Sean Greer

What do we want from the past, anyway? For it to trifle with us no longer? For it to cease its surprises, its stirrings, its stings, for it to be fixed forever—for it to die? But the past is like those jellyfish that, when harmed, coil into themselves and revert to immature blobs from which they begin new lives and become, in simple terms, immortal. What can we do but look away from such painful miracles?

How many late dinners of ham and pickled anchovies? How many arguments over the sock drawer—blacks mixing with navy blues—until they decided at last to have separate drawers? Separate duvets, as in Germany? Separate brands of coffee and tea? Separate vacations

America, how's your marriage? Your two-hundred-fifty-year-old promise to stay together in sickness and in health? First thirteen states, then more and more, until fifty of you had taken the vow. Like

Perhaps because he grew up on the Eastern Seaboard, where affection was kept in the cupboard with the hurricane lamps, or perhaps it was merely because his parents, including a loving mother who, like a famous actor omitting from a script lines she cannot pronounce, simply could not say "I love you." Less used to tease her about this; he knew she loved him, knew this beyond any doubt

Just an exit, and here, wonderfully, a young man in an old man's mustache, holding a sign lettered SR. ESS. Less raises his hand, and the man takes his luggage. Inside the sleek black car, Less finds his driver speaks no English. Fantastico, he thinks as he closes his eyes again.

We had apparently brought with us only the case of Dewey beer (from Delaware)

All I wanted was love. A simple thing, a timeless thing. When men want love they sing for it, or smile for it, or pay for it. And what do women do? They choose. And their lives are struck like bronze medallions. So tell me, gentlemen, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman?

Less has booked himself into a Christian retreat center. He has nothing personal against Christ; though raised Unitarian—with its glaring omission of Jesus and a hymnal so unorthodox that it was years before Less understood "Accentuate the Positive" was not in the Book of Common Prayer—

You are seeing suffering, Robert used to say when confronted with a horrible person. You are seeing someone in pain.

the truth of existence has not quite pierced his soul: That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It's nothing but protagonists. It's protagonists all the way down.

Is there a pill for when the image of a trumpet vine comes into your head? Will it erase it? Erase the voice saying, You should kiss me like it's good-bye? Erase the tuxedo jacket, or at least the face above it? Erase the whole nine years?

He is grieving, for sure—the loss of his lover, his career, his novel, his youth—so why not cover the mirrors, rend the fabric over his heart, and just let himself mourn? Perhaps he should try alone.

Sir, I hope you feel safe here.

What could be more normal than to be out of place everywhere you go?

Only in brief flashes does it come to us that we may never see someone again.

For the dead live only in us.

I think in a 1980s comedy version, Steve Martin would be a Pilgrim who's, like, cursed by a witch and time-travels and ends up very, very tiny living inside my skull. And the witch is Lily Tomlin and she's immortal and now she's running an oil company I work for or something.

real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It's nothing but protagonists. It's protagonists all the way down.

Let's call him Reilly O'Shaunessy. Because that was his name.

This is once-in-a-lifetime suffering and pain and heartache and yet it may be your only chance to decide what you really want.

Women must be careful what we say to one another. We are almost all we have.

This is once-in-a-lifetime suffering and pain and heartache and yet it may be your only chance to decide what you really want. None of this I don't want to change bullshit. Hell no—you've changed. That's happened. Now what?

The disk, of Swiss manufacture, unfolded into a tent whose vast interior defied belief; Less was fascinated by its pockets, air vents, rain flies; its stitching, netting, and circular Guggenheim ceiling. But, like the Swiss, it was neutral; it did not love him back

Sure of his infallibility, he unzipped the insect mesh and let in a rowdy bachelorette party of mosquitoes that raided the human open bar