Quotes from Andrew Sean Greer

A white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows? Jesus, I guess so. Arthur. Sorry to tell you this. It's a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that. Even gay? Even gay.

I absolutely look at people's bookshelves. And I have some judgment. I mean, they're openly showing you themselves.

Prizes aren't love. Because people who never met you can't love you.

We think we know people, and dismiss the scenes as aberrations, as the lightning strikes of madness, but surely we are wrong. Surely these are the truest moments of their lives.

A man he almost stayed with, almost loved, and now he does not even recognize him on the street. Either Less is an asshole, or the heart is a capricious thing. It is not impossible both are true.

Why this endless need for a man as a mirror? To see the Arthur Less reflected there? 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.

Arthur Less has left the room while remaining in it.

Nothing has happened in right field all season, which is why he was put there: a kind of athletic Canada.

Have you met someone?" "Me? I think maybe I'll go it on my own. Maybe I'm better that way. Maybe I was always better that way and it was just that when I was young, I was so scared, and now I'm not scared.

It turns out that you don't end up with the people you love; by definition, you end up with the ones who stay.

Here was a thing that would grow old; here was a thing that would turn beautiful and lose that beauty, that would inherit the grace but also the bad ear and flawed figure of her mother, that would smile too much and squint too often and spend the last decades of her life creaming away the wrinkles made in youth until she finally gave up and wore a collar of pears to hide a wattle; here was the ordinary sadness of the world.

Almost sixty years ago, just after midnight, a few feet from the river where they danced, a wonder of modern engineering occurred: overnight, the Berlin Wall arose. It was the night of August 15, 1961. Berliners awoke on the sixteenth to this marvel, more of a fence at first, concrete posts driven into the streets and festooned with barbed wire. They knew trouble would come but expected it in degrees. Life so often arrives all of a sudden. And who knows which side you will find yourself on?

Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.

You write what you are compelled to.

there's no love of your life. Love isn't terrifying like that. It's walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it's doing taxes, it's cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings. It's having an ally in life. It's not fire, it's not lightning.

The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?

Bougainvillea bloomed on their porch like a discarded prom dress.

We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations;

Change was not something you waited for, quietly, mutely, in a house by the ocean, nothing would ever change unless we forced it into shape.

There are always a few drops left in the bottle of indignity.

Well"—Lewis announcing over coffee and honeyed flatbreads—"we are being given an opportunity for a different experience than the one we were expecting.

More likable, make Swift more likable. That's what everyone's saying; nobody cares what this character suffers. But how do you do it? It's like making oneself more likable. And at fifty, Less muses drowsily, you're as likable as you're going to get.

I have a randezvous with life.

We think we know the ones we love, and though we should not be surprised to find that we don't, it is heartbreak nonetheless. It is the hardest kind of knowledge, not just about another but about ourselves. To see our lives as a fiction we have written and believed. Silence and lies. The sensation I felt that evening--that I did not know my Holland, did not know myself, that it was perhaps impossible to know a single soul on earth--it was a fearful loneliness.