Quotes from Adam Haslett

Sound systems are what turn cars into escape vehicles, even if you've got nowhere to go.

Everyone has nightmares. They're tough sometimes. You wake up and you get on with things. That's just how it is.

He is so committed to his guilt. He needs Michael's death to be his fault. It's what keeps his brother alive for him—that connection. As though, as long as he still has a confession to make, Michael will be forced one day to return in order to hear it. Without that prospect, there is only an ending.

Rasca a un altruista y verás sangrar a un hipócrita.

I did what most kids do when their world feels destroyed. I tried to care less about what remained...It was untrue, of course.

the simplest way to block out the strangeness of time passing before your eyes is to fix it in place, to edit it down to monuments or potted plants.

Du und alle Erben des Wohlstands, die glauben, das Leben sei eine Frage perfektionierter Gefühle. Ihr irrt euch.

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. Without knowing what it was, I'd felt that tension in his little groping arms and fitful legs, the discomfort of the foreknowledge

Boredom is easy. Which is why sadness hides there so readily. But don't be fooled for long. Dying of boredom. There's reason behind that idiom. It'll kill you sure enough.

We ward off love because it presents itself to us as a demand: to acknowledge another person's needs, and thus our own; to glimpse their mortality, and thus ours. We each have our own means of achieving this avoidance.

I wouldn't have believed her, but she's never dissembled. She doesn't have the energy for it, and she isn't trying to get anywhere, so she has no reason to lie or manipulate people. It's one of

For once, there was nothing to be disappointed in. Which left me with just the feeling of the disappointment itself.

There's a limit, Alec. 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.

I don't know what most people mean when they use the word love. If they haven't contorted their lives around a hope sharp enough to bleed them empty, then I think they're just kidding. A

What he had said to me a moment ago was true. I hadn't been listening to him, not for years. I'd wanted him to be better for so long that I had stopped hearing him tell me he was sick. For the first time I saw him now as a man, not a member of a family. A separate person, who had been trying as hard as he could for most of his life simply to get by.

There were times when he had the air of a mystic about him, as children sometimes do, as if he were staring calmly into the nature of things and had the wisdom to know there were no words for it.

he'd use both hands to try to pry my thumb

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. Not until I sat in that room, with the dead vehicle that had carried my brother through his life, and for which I had always mistaken him.

As Michael saw it, capitalism had been cruel to our father, giving him no quarter when he was down, the weight of no money and too much responsibility dragging him under. Which didn't mean he hadn't been sick, but that there had been no margin for being sick.

A shield. That's what the memories were, the ones that had risen in her with such force of late. A barricade thrown up against the depredations of the present.

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. But

It had taken me a long time to see how strong this desire for an answer was. I had to train myself to notice how it arose, and how to put it aside. Because if all I did was scour what a person said to me each week for clues, I wouldn't do her much good. I had to give up my own need to cure if I was going to stand any chance of shepherding her toward acceptance of who she already was.

I vowed never to let that happen again. Never to put myself in a position to be left by a man. It was one of those youthful promises you make to yourself and keep long after you stop recognizing what you are doing, or how it is distorting your life.

how deeply I had made that promise, and how long I had kept it, never being with a man who might leave me. Always maintaining that control. A promise to oneself never to be left. What sleight of mind.