Top 30 Adam Haslett Quotes (2024 Update)

Adam Haslett Quote: “Discovery is the joy.”

1. “Discovery is the joy.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.”

2. “If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “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.”

3. “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.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.”

4. “It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “It’s not until she sits up and wipes her eyes that I realize she’s crying. My words are like knives; they cut into the people I love. It will be worse if you touch her, I think, a worse lie. But I ignore this thought, shifting down the bench to put my arm around her – my daughter – and as I do, she weeps openly, pressing her face against my damp shirt.”

5. “It’s not until she sits up and wipes her eyes that I realize she’s crying. My words are like knives; they cut into the people I love. It will be worse if you touch her, I think, a worse lie. But I ignore this thought, shifting down the bench to put my arm around her – my daughter – and as I do, she weeps openly, pressing her face against my damp shirt.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.”

6. “My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “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.”

7. “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.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “We’re not individuals. We’re haunted by the living as well as the dead.”

8. “We’re not individuals. We’re haunted by the living as well as the dead.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “There’s something illiberal about the way infants are thrust into the hands of people who have no idea what they’re doing, who can only experiment.”

9. “There’s something illiberal about the way infants are thrust into the hands of people who have no idea what they’re doing, who can only experiment.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “I’m the only one who doesn’t always want answers. John may never articulate his questions, but they are with him, a way of being. And the children want answers to everything all the time. What’s for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner? Where’s Kelsey? Where’s Dad? Why do we have to come in? Why do we have to go to bed? Some days the only words I speak to them are answers, and reasons I can’t answer, and instructions in place of the answers they want.”

10. “I’m the only one who doesn’t always want answers. John may never articulate his questions, but they are with him, a way of being. And the children want answers to everything all the time. What’s for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner? Where’s Kelsey? Where’s Dad? Why do we have to come in? Why do we have to go to bed? Some days the only words I speak to them are answers, and reasons I can’t answer, and instructions in place of the answers they want.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “The monster you lie with is your own. The struggle is endlessly private. I thought it was over. That one night the beast at my back would squeeze more tightly and I would cease breathing. What remained of me hoped for it.”

11. “The monster you lie with is your own. The struggle is endlessly private. I thought it was over. That one night the beast at my back would squeeze more tightly and I would cease breathing. What remained of me hoped for it.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “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.”

12. “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.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “It struck me then, for the first time, how unethical anxiety is, how it voids the reality of other people by conscripting them as palliatives for your own fear.”

13. “It struck me then, for the first time, how unethical anxiety is, how it voids the reality of other people by conscripting them as palliatives for your own fear.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “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.”

14. “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.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “It was one of those youthful promises that you make to yourself and keep long after you stop recognizing what you are doing, or how it is distorting your life.”

15. “It was one of those youthful promises that you make to yourself and keep long after you stop recognizing what you are doing, or how it is distorting your life.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “But holding Michael had always been like holding a little person, who knew that his feeding would end, who knew that if you were picked up you would be put down, that the comfort came but also went.”

16. “But holding Michael had always been like holding a little person, who knew that his feeding would end, who knew that if you were picked up you would be put down, that the comfort came but also went.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings. If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we’ve chosen to govern ourselves.”

17. “We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings. If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we’ve chosen to govern ourselves.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “What he had said to me a moment ago was true. I hadn’t been listening to him, not for years. I’d wanted him to be better for so long that I had stopped hearing him tell me he was sick. For the first time I saw him now as a man, not a member of a family. A separate person, who had been trying as hard as he could for most of his life simply to get by.”

18. “What he had said to me a moment ago was true. I hadn’t been listening to him, not for years. I’d wanted him to be better for so long that I had stopped hearing him tell me he was sick. For the first time I saw him now as a man, not a member of a family. A separate person, who had been trying as hard as he could for most of his life simply to get by.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “This is the thing I have discovered: Michael’s being gone doesn’t mean we stop trying to save him. The strain is less but it doesn’t vanish. It becomes part of our bewilderment, a kind of activity without motive, which provides its own strange continuity.”

19. “This is the thing I have discovered: Michael’s being gone doesn’t mean we stop trying to save him. The strain is less but it doesn’t vanish. It becomes part of our bewilderment, a kind of activity without motive, which provides its own strange continuity.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “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.”

20. “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.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “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.”

21. “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.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “Sound systems are what turn cars into escape vehicles, even if you’ve got nowhere to go.”

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

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “Boredom is easy. Which is why sadness hides there so readily. But don’t be fooled for long. Dying of boredom. There’s reason behind that idiom. It’ll kill you sure enough.”

23. “Boredom is easy. Which is why sadness hides there so readily. But don’t be fooled for long. Dying of boredom. There’s reason behind that idiom. It’ll kill you sure enough.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “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.”

24. “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.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “I’m the only one who doesn’t always want answers.”

25. “I’m the only one who doesn’t always want answers.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “This is the thing: He isn’t calling about his exam. I don’t want to know that, but I do. He’s calling to be reassured about something he can’t put into words yet. I glimpsed it in him when he was young, but told myself, No, don’t imagine that. Children have stages; he’ll change. Then the words started running out of him in a torrent, and I knew they were being chased out by a force he couldn’t see. What was I supposed to say to Margaret? That I see it in him?”

26. “This is the thing: He isn’t calling about his exam. I don’t want to know that, but I do. He’s calling to be reassured about something he can’t put into words yet. I glimpsed it in him when he was young, but told myself, No, don’t imagine that. Children have stages; he’ll change. Then the words started running out of him in a torrent, and I knew they were being chased out by a force he couldn’t see. What was I supposed to say to Margaret? That I see it in him?”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “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.”

27. “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.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “The light in that room was a kind of malpractice.”

28. “The light in that room was a kind of malpractice.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “As I see it, my job as a writer isn’t to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.”

29. “As I see it, my job as a writer isn’t to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.”

— Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett Quote: “Everyone has nightmares. They’re tough sometimes. You wake up and you get on with things. That’s just how it is.”

30. “Everyone has nightmares. They’re tough sometimes. You wake up and you get on with things. That’s just how it is.”

— Adam Haslett

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