Sarah Manguso Quotes

Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.

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.

Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little.

If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it.

Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing.

Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us - by taking everything

You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing. You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness into brightness.

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear.

The more you talk about something, the less accurate it gets.

I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose.

This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.

The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know.

I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.

If I'm not writing a thing, depression might be looming.

I see no reason not to write whatever comes to me.

Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity.

Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.

Today was very full, but the problem isn't today. It's tomorrow. I'd be able to recover from today if it weren't for tomorrow. There should be extra days, buffer days, between real days.

I read obituaries every day to learn what sorts of lives are available to us, to see an entire life compressed into a few column inches, to fit the whole story in my eye at once.