Quotes from Andrew Sean Greer

I understand that it wasn't that you didnt want to be with me anymore, but you didn't want to be yourself anymore, the one you were with me.

Maybe I'm a bad writer." "No. You're a very good writer. Kalipso was a chef d'oeuvre. So beautiful, Arthur. I admired it a lot." Now Less is stumped. He probes his weaknesses. Too magniloquent? Too spoony? "Too old?" he ventures. "We're all over fifty, Arthur. It's not that you're a bad writer." Finley pauses for effect. "It's that you're a bad gay.

And there is his three-year-old daughter, who runs around wearing nothing but a rhinestone necklace (who wouldn't, if they could?).

Lovers don't leave if there's any hope at all.

It's true things can go on till you die. And people use the same old table, even though it's falling apart and it's been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother's. That's how towns become ghost towns. It's how houses become junk stores. And I think it's how people get old.

meaning his stuffed bear who was as real to him as his mother or me. Or else as imaginary.

By his forties, all he has managed to grow is a gentle sense of himself, akin to the transparent carapace of a soft-shelled crab.

In the suburbs of Delaware, spring meant not young love and damp flowers but an ugly divorce from winter and a second marriage to buxom summer.

What does one ever ask an author except: "How?" And the answer, as Less well knows, is obvious: "Beats me!

They have come dressed as robots or space goddesses or aliens because a writer has changed their lives.

We kept each other's stare a long time, for we had each done a startling thing, dodged time for an instant - which is the only definition of happiness I know.

As the Japanese will tell you, one can train a rose to grow through anything, to grow through a nautilus even, but it must be done with tenderness.

They knew trouble would come but expected it in degrees. Life so often arrives all of a sudden.

the impossible happens once to each of us

We are each the love of someone's life --- The Confessions of Max Tivoli

Then I traveled. Quite a bit, in fact. You have to stockpile a few beautiful vistas in your memory, Pearlie. In case we're rationed again.

He thinks each day will be better than the next; he is wrong. He awakens the next morning and thinks it again; he is wrong. He thinks we are free to become our true selves, that we are free to love as we choose. A mindset so UnitedStatesian, you could serve it with ketchup. But, friends, you cannot live on ketchup.

No one has ever asked them to translate a sentence from Carson McCullers (In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together) into German (In der Stadt gab es zwei Stumme, und sie waren immer zusammen) and pass it around the room, retranslating as they go, until it comes out as playground gibberish: In the bar there were two potatoes together, and they were trouble.

And there is his three-year-old daughter, who runs around wearing nothing but a rhinestone necklace (who wouldn't, if they could?). She is able to count, in English, methodically as a cart climbing uphill, up to the number fourteen—and then the wheels come off: "Twenty-one!" she screams in delight. "Eighteen! Forty-three! Eleventy! Twine!

It is hard to know how someone else will travel, and Freddy and Less, at first, were at odds. Though a virtual water bug in our adventures, in ordinary travel Less was always a hermit crab in a borrowed shell: he liked to get to know a street, and a café, and a restaurant, and be called by name by the waiters, and owners, and coat-check girl, so that when he left, he could think of it fondly as another home.

What do you call a guy who you're sleeping with --Let's say you do that for nine years, you make breakfast and have birthday parties and arguments and wear what he tells you to wear, for nine years, and you're nice to his friends, and he's always at your place, but you know all the time it can't go anywhere, he's going to find someone, it won't be you, that's agreed on from the start, he's going to find someone and marry him -- what do you call that guy?

one million furious you didn't call for sex, but only five actually available to meet you.

and they were having some new kind of beer that tasted like aspirin and smelled like magnolias and cost more than a hamburger.

What made it happen? What made it not happen? Thinking of a cure, a week away from the city, a dinner party with other geniuses, a new rug, a new shirt, a new way to hold him in bed, and failing and failing and somehow, at random, succeeding. Was it worth it?