87 Quotes by Sarah Manguso

Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.

Bad art is from no one to no one.

In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time. I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby's continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. I was the warmth and milk that was always there for him, the agent of comfort that was always there for him. My body, my life, became the landscape of my son's life. I am no longer merely a thing living in the world; I am a world.

I tried to record each moment, but time isn’t made of moments; it contains moments. There is more to it than moments.

The first time you love someone who doesn't love you back it seems wrong, not morally but logically, a river flowing up a mountain. How can such a feeling be wrong? You'll return to that very river, as many times as it takes.

I was angry at the ghost for months, would shout at it to stop trying to scare me. Now I understand it's just lonely.

I wish I could ask the future whether I should give up or keep trying. Then again, what if trying, even in the face of certain failure, feels as good as accomplishing? What if it's even better? And here we are again.

It’s impossible to fail if one doesn’t know how the end should look. And it’s impossible to succeed. But it’s possible to enjoy.

Whatever you're feeling, billions already have. Feel for them.