Quotes from Andrew Sean Greer

What ghost will visit our Hamlet tonight on the castle walls of his dreams? Surely not Robert Brownburn; even if there is a heaven where all animals and men are brought together in a mad reunion, atheists such as Robert will not return to us in phantom form—not because they reside in some celestial detention but out of pure stubbornness.

It's easy to say something is all in your head. It's like saying a sunset is all in your eyes," she said, gesturing, pursing her mouth in small furies. "It's stupid, it's nonsense. It has no brain for beauty.

Who knows what constellation rises there, shaped like a question mark? The Question Mark, perhaps. Coming at the end of an ever-expanding cosmic doubt begun at the first keystroke of Time. If only there were another constellation: The Answer.

Mescal turns out to be a drink that tastes as if someone has put their cigarette out in it. You drink it, he is informed, with an orange slice that has been coated in toasted worms. "You are kidding me," Less says, but they are not kidding him.

but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked.

Standing on the deck of a San Francisco ferryboat, in a gray suit so precisely the same colour as the fog that he seems (as in a not particularly scary movie) to be a ghostly floating head

He is not the best. But he is the best I ever had. Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel secure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody's tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?

No one could rival Author Less for his ability to exit a room while remaining inside it. He sat, and his mind immediately left me behind...I was too much in law of his self-sufficiency, of his freedom. To disappear within himself for ten or fifteen minutes while I drew him, when I could barely sit still to hold the pencil.

in a gray suit so precisely the same color as the fog that he seems (as in a not particularly scary movie) to be a ghostly floating head.

our Minor American Novelist is making his way to a small gold-rush town in the Sierra Nevadas to give a lecture in their Significant Speakers series. For anyone else, it would be a mere three-hour journey, but our Arthur Less has to do things the hard way; he has chosen to take a ferry and a train.

Così comincerò dalla fine, dicendovi che siamo tutti il grande amore di qualcuno

Strange to be almost fifty, no? 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." "You

neither gay nor straight, just odd

Realizing we are no longer in love is not the heartbreaking sensation we imagine when we are in love—because it is no sensation at all. It is a realization made by a bystander.

You may think: What's happened? Good God, are they kidding? But it is a rule of life, alas, that nobody is kidding.

Things are going so well today that it feels not impossible it is the Nobel Committee. But, friends, it is not the Nobel Committee. It is a rule of life, alas, that it is never the Nobel Committee.

What had Freddy meant, the bravest person I know? For Less, it is a mystery. Name a day, name an hour, in which Arthur Less was not afraid. Of ordering a cocktail, taking a taxi, teaching a class, writing a book. Afraid of these and almost everything else in the world. Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.

How often in life do people make that awful sacrifice, that murder of possibilities?

somebody has to catch the mouse. So here's my proposal. You be the strong one Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. And I'll be the strong one Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

What plant could flower under the cold sun of Reagan?

So tell me, gentlemen, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman?" Excerpt From: Andrew Sean Greer. "The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells." HarperCollins. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

Just when we lose hope and believe life to be chaos, fate provides a pattern

Less has come alive to his senses, his curiosity, his fears, his memory, and entered that separate realm of being in which the outer world does not vanish, not at all, but pricks with painful detail, the province not of the reader or the critic but of that suffering creature trapped behind the looking glass: the writer. For now Less is paying attention.

Fuck it. I gave up smoking. and I can give up love.