44 Quotes by Adam Haslett

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

That is much of what I think the writer’s job is – to slow people down. To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive. Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.