Quotes from Andrew Sean Greer

Maybe he never did. Less knows so well the pleasures of youth—danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger's mouth—and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age—comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunsets over

You have the luck of a comedian. Bad luck in things that don't matter. Good luck in things that do.

Why didn't he say yes? Freddy's voice from the past: You want me to stay here with you forever? Why didn't he say yes?

The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person.

There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very slow road…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.

The restaurant sits on a rock above the river and is very old and water stained in ways that would delight a painter and trouble a contractor.

Grief will go--it always does-- but not before it forces us to do these absurd things, and hurt ourselves, and bring on suffering, because grief, that parasite, above all else does not want to die, and only in these terrible moments it creates can it feel itself thrashing back to life.

We are deaf to what life brings us.

I need you to do my bow tie. I forget how because I know you never will. Prizes aren't love, but this is love.

I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what

Nothing happened to me. I'm just a homosexual at a Broadway show.

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. Freddy was the opposite. He wanted to see everything.

Just as a gay couple cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Marrakech, he thinks, two men, best friends, cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Chicago.

What god has enough free time to arrange this very special humiliation, to fly a minor novelist across the world so that he can feel, in some seventh sense, the minusculitude of his own worth?

Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense.

Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.

A burned-out face trying not to break open at the horror he has seen. The way they look at you, those poor broken men; it's not empty or terrified at all. It's as if you were the first sign of life, of beauty, after a long, long winter. Does love always form, like a pearl, around these hardened bits of life?

Young people are inept at love; it is like being given a flying machine, and you leap inside, ready to set off as you've always dreamed, yet you don't have the first notion of how to make it start, much less how to make it move.

Less is technically Christian. There is really no other word for someone who celebrates Christmas and Easter, even if only as craft projects.

It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they've survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It's that they've survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here:

the coffeemaker in his hotel room is a hungry little mollusk, snapping open its jaws to devour pods and subsequently secreting coffee into a mug.

The beauty of his youth somehow taken from its winter storage and given back to him in middle age.

Surely the sun is already hammering the beach like a tinsmith.

One person after another came up and said his mother was at peace. His mother's friends: each with her own peculiar spiked or curled white hairdo, like a dahlia show.