Top 180 Andrew Sean Greer Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Boredom is the only real tragedy for a writer; everything else is material.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

52. “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.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

53. “Where is the real Less? Less the young man terrified of love? The dead-serious Less of twenty-five years ago? Well, he has not packed him at all. After all these years, Less doesn’t even know where he’s stored.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

54. “Who can ever say, this is the last? Only one is true, but all of them feel true, and the tears we shed are equal every time.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

55. “I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

57. “We think we know people, and dismiss the scenes as aberrations, as the lightning strikes of madness, but surely we are wrong. Surely these are the truest moments of their lives.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

58. “The restaurant sits on a rock above the river and is very old and water stained in ways that would delight a painter and trouble a contractor.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

59. “More likable, make Swift more likable. That’s what everyone’s saying; nobody cares what this character suffers. But how do you do it? It’s like making oneself more likable. And at fifty, Less muses drowsily, you’re as likable as you’re going to get.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

60. “Prizes aren’t love. Because people who never met you can’t love you. The slots for winners are already set, from here until Judgment Day.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

61. “His first response to Peter was to ask: “How did they even know I was gay?” He asked this from his front porch, wearing a kimono.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

62. “The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

63. “Nothing has happened in right field all season, which is why he was put there: a kind of athletic Canada.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

64. “We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations; it is the salt in the pudding.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

65. “It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

66. “One person after another came up and said his mother was at peace. His mother’s friends: each with her own peculiar spiked or curled white hairdo, like a dahlia show.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

67. “We have no heart at seventeen. We think we do; we think we have been cursed with a holy, bloated thing that twitches at the name we adore, but it is not a heart because though it will forfeit anything in the world-the mind, the body, the future, even the last lonely hour it has-it will not sacrifice itself.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

68. “As the Japanese will tell you, one can train a rose to grow through anything, to grow through a nautilus even, but it must be done with tenderness.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

69. “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

70. “Lovers don’t leave if there’s any hope at all.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

71. “Less knows so well the pleasures of youth – danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger’s mouth – and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age – comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunsets over the water. His entire life, he has alternated between the two.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

72. “The beauty of his youth somehow taken from its winter storage and given back to him in middle age.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

73. “We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations;.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

74. “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.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

75. “Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it’s unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can’t touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

76. “I absolutely look at people’s bookshelves. And I have some judgment. I mean, they’re openly showing you themselves.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

77. “Have you met someone?” “Me? I think maybe I’ll go it on my own. Maybe I’m better that way. Maybe I was always better that way and it was just that when I was young, I was so scared, and now I’m not scared.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

78. “Less is technically Christian. There is really no other word for someone who celebrates Christmas and Easter, even if only as craft projects.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

79. “The brain is so wrong, all the time,” she says, turning to the dark landscape again. “Wrong about what time it is, and who people are, and where home is: wrong wrong wrong. The lying brain.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

80. “Perhaps he was burning down a house in which he no longer wanted to live.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

81. “Every book it’s the hardest part-finding the way in, finding the voice to tell the story. H.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

82. “Life, it’s so unlikely,” she said, then turned to me again. “It’s so much better than we think it is, isn’t it?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

83. “Almost sixty years ago, just after midnight, a few feet from the river where they danced, a wonder of modern engineering occurred: overnight, the Berlin Wall arose. It was the night of August 15, 1961. Berliners awoke on the sixteenth to this marvel, more of a fence at first, concrete posts driven into the streets and festooned with barbed wire. They knew trouble would come but expected it in degrees. Life so often arrives all of a sudden. And who knows which side you will find yourself on?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

84. “Yes, even old American writers are dancing like it is still the eighties in San Francisco, like the sexual revolution has been won, like the war is over and Berlin has been liberated, one’s own self has been liberated; and what the Bavarian in his arms is whispering is true, and everyone, everyone – even Arthur Less – is loved.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

85. “The key to speaking a new language,” she told them, “is to be bold instead of perfect.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

86. “Grief will go – it always does – but not before it forces us to do these absurd things, and hurt ourselves, and bring on suffering, because grief, that parasite, above all else does not want to die, and only in these terrible moments it creates can it feel itself thrashing back to life.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

87. “You should kiss me like it’s goodbye.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

88. “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.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

89. “And yet what she has said – the lying brain – this is familiar; this has happened to him. Not exactly like this, not utter terrifying madness, but he knows his brain has told him things he has traveled around the world to forget. That the mind cannot be trusted is a certainty.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

90. “Around the world his pity flies, its wingspan as wide as an albatross’s.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

91. “What made it happen? What made it not happen? Thinking of a cure, a week away from the city, a dinner party with other geniuses, a new rug, a new shirt, a new way to hold him in bed, and failing and failing and somehow, at random, succeeding. Was it worth it?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

92. “Like measles, love was the kind of thing you had to catch in youth, dispel, so that it would not leap upon you in old age and kill you.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

93. “We waste so much time within ourselves.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

94. “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.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

95. “What does one ever ask an author except: “How?” And the answer, as Less well knows, is obvious: “Beats me!”

— Andrew Sean Greer

96. “I understand that it wasn’t that you didnt want to be with me anymore, but you didn’t want to be yourself anymore, the one you were with me.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

97. “Clark always says that you can be thin or you can be happy, and, Arthur, I have already tried thin.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

98. “They have come dressed as robots or space goddesses or aliens because a writer has changed their lives.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

99. “Well” – Lewis announcing over coffee and honeyed flatbreads – “we are being given an opportunity for a different experience than the one we were expecting.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

100. “A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we’re married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that’s why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he’s dead.”

— Andrew Sean Greer