Top 180 Andrew Sean Greer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

2. “Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

3. “We are each the love of someone’s life.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

4. “It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one’s life for love.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

5. “By the end, Arthur Less is in tears, sobbing in his seat, and he thinks he has been sobbing quietly until the lights come up and the woman seated beside him turns and says, “Honey, I don’t know what happened in your life, but I am so so sorry,” and gives him a lilac-scented embrace. Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I’m just a homosexual at a Broadway show.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

6. “His brain sits before its cash register again, charging him for old shames as if he has not paid before.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

7. “Bougainvillea bloomed on their porch like a discarded prom dress.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

8. “What is love, Arthur? What is it?” she asks him. “Is it the good dear thing I had with Janet for eight years? Is it the good dear thing? Or is it the lightning bolt? The destructive madness that hit my girl?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

9. “So many people will do. But once you’ve actually been in love, you can’t live with “will do”; it’s worse than living with yourself.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

10. “What god has enough free time to arrange this very special humiliation, to fly a minor novelist across the world so that he can feel, in some seventh sense, the minusculitude of his own worth?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

11. “Here, all this time, Less thought he was merely a bad writer. A bad lover, a bad friend, a bad son. Apparently the condition is worse; he is bad at being himself.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

12. “Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

13. “I’ve got a theory. Now, hear me out. It’s that our lives are half comedy and half tragedy. And for some people, it just works out that the first entire half of their lives is tragedy and then the second half is comedy.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

14. “What Frank wrote: It’s a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything in the world.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

15. “No one could rival Arthur Less for his ability to exit a room while remaining inside it.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

16. “Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

17. “He kisses – how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you. There are some men who have never been kissed like that. There are some men who discover, after Arthur Less, that they never will be again.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

18. “How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You’re boneless as an anemone.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

19. “Name a day, name an hour, in which Arthur Less was not afraid. Of ordering a cocktail, taking a taxi, teaching a class, writing a book. Afraid of these and almost everything else in the world. Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

20. “It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another’s heart.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

21. “Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

22. “There are always a few drops left in the bottle of indignity.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

23. “I look at you, and you’re young. You’ll always be that way for me. But not for anyone else. Arthur, people who meet you now will never be able to imagine you young.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

24. “How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves – our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

25. “We are each the love of someone’s life – The Confessions of Max Tivoli.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

26. “So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

27. “Then I traveled. Quite a bit, in fact. You have to stockpile a few beautiful vistas in your memory, Pearlie. In case we’re rationed again.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

28. “But heartbreak – how can you avoid it except to renounce love entirely.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

29. “Did you love it, the rain dance every day? Only when it rained.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

31. “Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

32. “Who on earth would not long to be fought for? Is this not the very heart of human existence, to be worth fighting for, worth losing everything for?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

33. “With lovers, though, the end is always there. It is a death as certain as the real death, and those of us in love, as at the bedside, begin to prepare ourselves. We might say it isn’t working, or I can’t give you what you need, and yet a day later there he is in your arms, and who can help it? There is the good-bye, and the good-bye, and the good-bye, and which will stick? Who can ever say, this is the last? One one is true, but all of them feel true, and the tears we shed are equal every time.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

34. “It may be a childish torment, but we do not get to choose our demons.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

35. “Why this endless need for a man as a mirror? To see the Arthur Less reflected there? He is grieving, for sure – the loss of his lover, his career, his novel, his youth – so why not cover the mirrors, rend the fabric over his heart, and just let himself mourn? Perhaps he should try alone.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

36. “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?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

37. “It’s true things can go on till you die. And people use the same old table, even though it’s falling apart and it’s been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother’s. That’s how towns become ghost towns. It’s how houses become junk stores. And I think it’s how people get old.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

38. “Why didn’t he say yes? Freddy’s voice from the past: You want me to stay here with you forever? Why didn’t he say yes?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

40. “For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I’m working on, I’ll say, it’s a time travel novel. I haven’t written very much of it. That’s the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don’t write their fiction there, they just do their research.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

41. “Arthur Less has left the room while remaining in it.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

42. “Where was he? Somewhere in there he lost the first phase of youth, like the first phase of a rocket; it had fallen, depleted, behind him. And here was the second. And last. He swore he would not give it to anyone; he would enjoy it. He would enjoy it alone. But: how to live alone and yet not be alone?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

43. “Boredom is the only real tragedy for a writer; everything else is material. Robert never said anything of the sort. Boredom is essential for writers; it is the only time they get to write.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

44. “The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

45. “Surely the sun is already hammering the beach like a tinsmith.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

46. “Here was a thing that would grow old; here was a thing that would turn beautiful and lose that beauty, that would inherit the grace but also the bad ear and flawed figure of her mother, that would smile too much and squint too often and spend the last decades of her life creaming away the wrinkles made in youth until she finally gave up and wore a collar of pears to hide a wattle; here was the ordinary sadness of the world.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

47. “You have the luck of a comedian. Bad luck in things that don’t matter. Good luck in things that do.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

48. “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?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

49. “He knows the absurdity of asking someone to explain love or sorrow. You can’t point to it. It would be as futile, as unconveyable, as pointing at the sky and saying: that one, that star, there.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

50. “For is my story really so unusual? To wake each morning as if things had gone differently – the dead come back, the lost returned, the beloved in our arms – is it really any more magic than the ordinary madness of hope?”

— Andrew Sean Greer