Top 180 Andrew Sean Greer Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “It’s just that, you know how it is in some relationships, how one of them is a little more in love. Well, it’s like that with friendships. Sometimes one of them thinks they’re really close, closer than they are. And the other doesn’t feel that way.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

103. “Despite the gray in his beard, what I felt kept him young were the childhood hobgoblins he retained as pets: his fear of sharks, even in a swimming pool; his fear of mispronouncing “dour.” He laughed each time he caught himself, and told me so.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

104. “You write what you are compelled to.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

105. “If only he could learn to lie so compassionately.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

106. “This was the human mind made real, overshadowing even the birds in its longing to be free. Are we the only animals that must escape ourselves? Because, seeing that balloon, I could imagine my own soul, trapped in the dusty acreage of my old body, burning with a flame like this and lifting away from me, just as silvered, just as new.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

107. “There is an old Arabic story about a man who hears Death is coming for him, so he sneaks away to Samarra. And when he gets there, he finds Death in the market, and Death says, “You know, I just felt like going on vacation to Samarra. I was going to skip you today, but how lucky you showed up to find me!” And the man is taken after all.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

108. “Change was not something you waited for, quietly, mutely, in a house by the ocean, nothing would ever change unless we forced it into shape.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

109. “It is a traveler’s fallacy that one should shop for clothing while abroad. Those white linen tunics, so elegant in Greece, emerge from the suitcase as mere hippie rags; the beautiful striped shirts of Rome are confined to the closet; and the delicate hand batiks of Bali are first cruise wear, then curtains, then signs of impending madness.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

110. “They knew trouble would come but expected it in degrees. Life so often arrives all of a sudden.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

111. “The heart will hear only one sound. A “no” will pass unnoticed, and a “good-bye” will be heard only as a deferral of hope; the future is unmarred, pushed forward by events but untouched by them because the heart sees only a perfect future with its beloved, and hears only news about that future. The rest, as they say, is noise. There is only one sound it can hear. There is only “yes.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

112. “Less is having a memory from nearly thirty years before: walking out of an Erasure concert with his friend, stoned, learning that the Democrats had retaken the Senate, and walking into this bar and declaring: “We want to sleep with a Republican! Who’s a Republican?” And every man in the place raising his hand.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

113. “Fate, that glockenspiel, will turn upon the hour.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

114. “I need you to do my bow tie. I forget how because I know you never will. Prizes aren’t love, but this is love.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

115. “The letter is in German; the university is under the impression Arthur Less is fluent in German, and Arthur Less’s publisher, who recommended him, is also under this impression. So is Arthur Less. ‘With God’s happiness’, he writes back, ‘I accept the pedestal of power’, and sends it off with a flush of pleasure.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

116. “A pang of love and regret; the name of an old amour on your cruise ship’s passenger list.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

117. “In the suburbs of Delaware, spring meant not young love and damp flowers but an ugly divorce from winter and a second marriage to buxom summer.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

118. “What could be more normal than to be out of place everywhere you go? What could be more American?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

119. “I think the saddest thing in the world is a twenty-five-year-old talking about the stock market.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

120. “Nothing happened to me. I’m just a homosexual at a Broadway show.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

121. “The villain raises first one eyebrow, then the other. “When I was young, all I wanted to read were pretentious little books. Camus and Tournier and Calvino. If it had a plot, I hated it.” “You remain this way,” Luisa chides, and he.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

122. “Why did he always assume Mexico City would be like Phoenix on a smoggy day? Why did no one tell him it would be Madrid.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

123. “And Less feels it swelling up within him, the phrase he does not want to say and yet, somehow, by the cruel checkmate logic of conversation, is compelled to say: “Thank you.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

124. “Arthur Less’s life with Robert ended around the time he finished reading Proust. It was one of the grandest and most dismaying experiences in Less’s life – Marcel Proust, that is – and the three thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time took him five committed summers to finish.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

125. “It’s like fitting a hand-me-down suit. It’s luck. Not love. Not that it isn’t nice to have luck. Maybe the only way to think of it is being at the center of all beauty. Just by chance, today we get to be in the center of all beauty.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

126. “How can so many things become a bore by middle age – philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods – but heartbreak keeps its sting?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

127. “Life so often arrives all of a sudden. And who knows which side you will find yourself on?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

128. “Was he testing to see how elastic love could be? Was he simply a man who had gladly given his youth to a man in midlife, and now nearing midlife himself, wanted back the fortune he squandered.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

129. “That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It’s nothing but protagonists. It’s protagonists all the way down.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

130. “Life so often arrives all of a sudden.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

131. “How does Less get the world so wrong? Over and over again. Where is the exit for moments like this?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

132. “No one could rival Arthur Less for his ability to exit a room while remaining inside it. He sat, and his mind immediately left me behind.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

133. “All he wanted was to be young together and in love. Too much to ask? “Nobody gets that,” she would say. “Nobody. Your problem is you’re convinced you have a type.” He would say of course he had a type, and she would say: “Give that up. Find someone who treats you decently.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

134. “Hard to feel bad for a middle-aged white man.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

135. “It was nothing like the rest of the city, no hills or views or bohemians, nothing Italian or Victorian to make you take a photograph.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

136. “Less finds himself searching for an appropriate prayer. He was, however, raised Unitarian; he has only Joan Baez to turn to, and “Diamonds and Rust” gives no solace. On and on the plane convulses in the moonlight, like a man turning into a werewolf.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

137. “Life was not hard; you shouldered it bravely, knowing all the time that if you sent the signal, help would arrive.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

138. “He chose a Lessian costume- jeans and a cowboy shirt, only slightly wrong- and made his way south along the hillside, toward the house.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

139. “A mediocre review or careless slight can no longer harm him, but heartbreak, real true heartbreak, can pierce his thin hide and bring out the same shade of blood as ever. How can so many things become a bore by middle age – philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods – but heartbreak keeps its sting? Perhaps because he finds fresh sources for.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

140. “Is it perhaps a radiation, an emanation of this innocence, this guilelessness, grown white-hot?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

141. “Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

142. “Arthur Less is the first homosexual ever to grow old. That is, at least, how he feels at times like these. Here, in this tub, he should be twenty-five or thirty, a beautiful young man naked in a bathtub. Enjoying the pleasures of life. How dreadful if someone came upon naked Less today: pink to his middle, gray to his scalp, like those old double erasers for pencil and ink.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

143. “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

144. “There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very slow ride... to your final place of rest.” He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men. Less understands: he has been assigned a poet.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

145. “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

146. “How awful for the string of inequities to be brought out in his mind, that useless rosary, so he can finger again those memories:.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

147. “When I was young, all I wanted to read were pretentious little books. Camus and Tournier and Calvino. If it had a plot, I hated it.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

148. “It is only the carrier of that wonderful mind, after all. A case for the crown.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

150. “You cannot call it a guilty pleasure when the lights go down and the curtain goes up, when the adolescent heart begins to beat along with the orchestra, not when you feel no guilt. And.”

— Andrew Sean Greer