215 Quotes by Andrew Sean Greer

Change was not something you waited for, quietly, mutely, in a house by the ocean, nothing would ever change unless we forced it into shape.

A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.

Where did the genius come from? Where did it go? Like allowing another lover into the house to live with you, someone you’d never met but whom you knew he loved more than you. Poetry every day. A novel every few years. Something happened in that room, despite everything; something beautiful happened. It was the only place in the world where time made things better.

And there is his three-year-old daughter, who runs around wearing nothing but a rhinestone necklace (who wouldn’t, if they could?).

When I was young, all I wanted to read were pretentious little books. Camus and Tournier and Calvino. If it had a plot, I hated it.

I absolutely look at people’s bookshelves. And I have some judgment. I mean, they’re openly showing you themselves.

Young people are inept at love; it is like being given a flying machine, and you leap inside, ready to set off as you've always dreamed, yet you don't have the first notion of how to make it start, much less how to make it move.

Men in their forties were so sexy: the calm assurance of what a man liked and didn’t, where he set limits and where he set none, experience and a sense of adventure. It made the sex so much better.

Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.