215 Quotes by Andrew Sean Greer

Less, as with a repentant worshipper, begins again to love his subject, and at last, one morning, after an hour sitting with his chin in his hand, watching birds cross the gray haze of the horizon, our benevolent god grants his character the brief benediction of joy.

It turns out that you don’t end up with the people you love; by definition, you end up with the ones who stay.

How do we forgive ourselves? Our parents watch us so carefully when we’re children, desperate not to miss a first scream, a first step, a first word, never taking their eyes off us. Yet we do not watch them. They near the end in solitude – even those who live beside us die in solitude – and rarely do we catch their own milestones: the last scream before the morphine settles in, last step before they cannot walk, last word before the throat seals.

What do you call a guy who you’re sleeping with – Let’s say you do that for nine years, you make breakfast and have birthday parties and arguments and wear what he tells you to wear, for nine years, and you’re nice to his friends, and he’s always at your place, but you know all the time it can’t go anywhere, he’s going to find someone, it won’t be you, that’s agreed on from the start, he’s going to find someone and marry him – what do you call that guy?

Prizes aren’t love. Because people who never met you can’t love you.

By his forties, all he has managed to grow is a gentle sense of himself, akin to the transparent carapace of a soft-shelled crab.

Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour?

And at fifty, Less muses drowsily, you’re as likable as you’re going to get.

Why is it so impossible to believe: that we are as many headed as monsters, as many armed as gods, as many hearted as angels?