Quotes from Adam Haslett

I had never understood before the invisibility of a human. How what we take to be a person is in fact a spirit we can never see.

He experienced a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person's unknowable pain. More than any landscape, this place felt like home.

It struck me then, for the first time, how unethical anxiety is, how it voids the reality of other people by conscripting them as palliatives for your own fear.

There is no getting better. There is love I cannot bear, which has kept me from drifting entirely loose. There are the medicines I can take that flood my mind without discrimination, slowing the monster, moving the struggle underwater, where I then must live in the murk. But there is no killing the beast. Since I was a young man, it has haunted me. And it will hunt me until I am dead. The older I become, the closer it gets.

That's what Proust calls it. On those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. That's the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you're alive - the backward ache. That's what music is.

We live among the dead until we join them,

The monster you lie with is your own. The struggle is endlessly private. I thought it was over. That one night the beast at my back would squeeze more tightly and I would cease breathing. What remained of me hoped for it.

This is the thing: He isn't calling about his exam. I don't want to know that, but I do. He's calling to be reassured about something he can't put into words yet. I glimpsed it in him when he was young, but told myself, No, don't imagine that. Children have stages; he'll change. Then the words started running out of him in a torrent, and I knew they were being chased out by a force he couldn't see. What was I supposed to say to Margaret? That I see it in him?

What I have always found most comforting about these forms is the trace of hope I get as I'm filling them out. How they break your life down into such tidy realms, making each seem tractable, because discrete, in a way they never are beyond the white noise of the waiting room. You get that fleeting sense that you're on the verge of being understood, truly and fully, and for the first time, if you could just get it all down in black and white before the receptionist calls your name.

It was one of those youthful promises that you make to yourself and keep long after you stop recognizing what you are doing, or how it is distorting your life.

That's the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you're alive - the backward ache. That's what music is. The trouble - for me - is that at some stage I realized those miracles, those aches, they have a history. They're not private. The music's always about what someone's lost. That's what you hear, when it's good: the worlds people lost, the ones they want back. And once you hear it that way, you can't avoid it - that it's somehow about justice.

Anywhere people lived memory collected like sediment on the bed of a river, dropping from the flow of time to become fixed in the places time ran over

The light in that room was a kind of malpractice.

This street-this whole town-was so familiar that I looked straight through it, as if it were no longer a place unto itself but merely an opening onto the past.

There's something illiberal about the way infants are thrust into the hands of people who have no idea what they're doing, who can only experiment.

even Michael, who never stopped trying to want what we wanted for him. How could he? We're not individuals. We're haunted by the living as well as the dead.

It's easy to make too much of fathers, I want to say. A

My mind can rest. Which is when my situation becomes obvious. There is no getting better. There is love I cannot bear, which has kept me from drifting entirely loose. There are the medicines I can take that flood my mind without discrimination, slowing the monster, moving the struggle underwater, where I then must live in the murk. But there is no killing the beast. Since I was a young man, it has hunted me. And it will hunt me until I am dead. The older I become, the closer it gets.

There is so much drivel about psychoactive meds, so much corruption, bad faith, over- and underprescription, vagueness, profiteering, ignorance, and hope, that it's easy to forget they sometimes work, alleviating real suffering, at least for a time. This was such a time. I

But holding Michael had always been like holding a little person, who knew that his feeding would end, who knew that if you were picked up you would be put down, that the comfort came but also went.

You don't want to think about it, but there's an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure. You can't just negate that with sentimentality. With the idea of some indomitable spirit. That's a fairy tale. It's what people say about other people, to avoid the wretchedness. It's just cruelty by other means. Requiring a person to stay alive. For you.

I'm the only one who doesn't always want answers. John may never articulate his questions, but they are with him, a way of being. And the children want answers to everything all the time. What's for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner? Where's Kelsey? Where's Dad? Why do we have to come in? Why do we have to go to bed? Some days the only words I speak to them are answers, and reasons I can't answer, and instructions in place of the answers they want.

We're not individuals. We're haunted by the living as well as the dead.

It's not until she sits up and wipes her eyes that I realize she's crying. My words are like knives; they cut into the people I love. It will be worse if you touch her, I think, a worse lie. But I ignore this thought, shifting down the bench to put my arm around her - my daughter - and as I do, she weeps openly, pressing her face against my damp shirt.