Quotes from Andrew Sean Greer

Perhaps he was burning down a house in which he no longer wanted to live.

Life, it's so unlikely," she said, then turned to me again. "It's so much better than we think it is, isn't it?

It is a traveler's fallacy that one should shop for clothing while abroad. Those white linen tunics, so elegant in Greece, emerge from the suitcase as mere hippie rags; the beautiful striped shirts of Rome are confined to the closet; and the delicate hand batiks of Bali are first cruise wear, then curtains, then signs of impending madness. And then there is Paris.

Prizes aren't love. Because people who never met you can't love you. The slots for winners are already set, from here until Judgment Day.

Less, as with a repentant worshipper, begins again to love his subject, and at last, one morning, after an hour sitting with his chin in his hand, watching birds cross the gray haze of the horizon, our benevolent god grants his character the brief benediction of joy.

Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I'm just a homosexual at a Broadway show.

Like measles, love was the kind of thing you had to catch in youth, dispel, so that it would not leap upon you in old age and kill you.

Maybe you can go through your whole life and never meet them, and think love is all these other things, but if you do meet them, God help you! Because then: ka-blam! You're screwed.

Arthur Less is the first homosexual ever to grow old. That is, at least, how he feels at times like these. Here, in this tub, he should be twenty-five or thirty, a beautiful young man naked in a bathtub. Enjoying the pleasures of life. How dreadful if someone came upon naked Less today: pink to his middle, gray to his scalp, like those old double erasers for pencil and ink.

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

His first response to Peter was to ask: "How did they even know I was gay?" He asked this from his front porch, wearing a kimono

Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour?

Arthur Less's life with Robert ended around the time he finished reading Proust. It was one of the grandest and most dismaying experiences in Less's life—Marcel Proust, that is—and the three thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time took him five committed summers to finish.

He is not the best. But he is the best I ever had.

something called Schwiegertochter gesucht, about country people looking to play matchmaker for their children, until the young man falls asleep with his body wrapped tight around Less's, his nose docked in Less's ear.

Who can ever say, this is the last? Only one is true, but all of them feel true, and the tears we shed are equal every time.

Slowly, the impossible dawned on him, and with terror he was forced to look deep within himself, as we all someday must, and ask: Am I the only frigid homosexual in New York? It turned out he was. So he left. So: Bad gay?

What I wanted to say was: I understand that it wasn't that you didn't want to be with me anymore, but you didn't want to be yourself anymore, the one you were with me.

Arturo says, "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.

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

Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you. There are some men who have never been kissed like that. There are some men who discover, after Arthur Less, that they never will be again.

How do we forgive ourselves? Our parents watch us so carefully when we're children, desperate not to miss a first scream, a first step, a first word, never taking their eyes off us. Yet we do not watch them. They near the end in solitude—even those who live beside us die in solitude—and rarely do we catch their own milestones: the last scream before the morphine settles in, last step before they cannot walk, last word before the throat seals.

We have no heart at seventeen. We think we do; we think we have been cursed with a holy, bloated thing that twitches at the name we adore, but it is not a heart because though it will forfeit anything in the world-the mind, the body, the future, even the last lonely hour it has-it will not sacrifice itself.

We waste so much time within ourselves.