44 Quotes by Adam Haslett

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings. If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we've chosen to govern ourselves.

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.

The light in that room was a kind of malpractice.

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.

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.

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings. If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we’ve chosen to govern ourselves.

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?