Top 180 Andrew Sean Greer Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Less saw its marks and scars and aches not as failures of age but the opposite: the evidence, as Raymond Chandler once wrote, of “a gaudy life.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

152. “Ninety years old and chatttering, chattering away as if the cure for his inability to speak Japanese were the application of more Japanese.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

153. “Acting almost on a species memory, he runs forward, the glove before him.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

154. “For a fifty-year-old man, the boredom of lying convalescent in bed is rivaled only by sitting in church.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

155. “The next day, Less hears Dr. Balk is down with a mysterious illness. In class, two young women quietly faint at their desks; as they collapse, their twin ponytails fly up like the tails of frightened deer. Less is beginning to see a pattern.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

156. “The moment holds neither disappointment nor delight. Realizing we are no longer in love is not the heartbreaking sensation we imagine when we are in love – because it is no sensation at all. It is a realization made by a bystander.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

157. “What is a person but this heap of loss? Otherwise – what wasted breath.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

158. “Yes, his gift to them is a Gift. Like Claudius with Hamlet’s father, he is ear poisoning the people of Berlin.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

159. “It’s like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won’t ever be back.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

160. “He has nothing personal against Christ; though raised Unitarian – with its glaring omission of Jesus and a hymnal so unorthodox that it was years before Less understood “Accentuate the Positive” was not in the Book of Common Prayer – 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

161. “Whenever Vincent pays a visit, Less prays for Jesus Christ Our Savior to extinguish his Libido.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

162. “Will Less ever again be so beloved?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

163. “Robert has never been kind to his body; he’s worn it like an old leather coat tossed in oceans and left crumpled in corners.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

164. “Both had the fantasy; neither had carried it out.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

165. “I was at a cocktail party in a new city, looking out at the view, when I felt the sensation of someone opening a window and turned. No one had opened a window; a new person had simply entered the room.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

166. “Why do today’s young men insist on marrying? Was this why we all threw stones at the police, for weddings.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

167. “Less searches inside himself for one last bit of antipathy, one speck in the heart’s pantry, but he does not even search very hard. How strange. The moment holds neither disappointment nor delight. Realizing we are no longer in love is not the heartbreaking sensation we imagine when we are in love – because it is no sensation at all. It is a realization made by a bystander.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

168. “Why this endless need for a man as a mirror? To see the Arthur Less reflected there?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

169. “Why didn’t he say yes?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

170. “Be in love, you will be happy.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

171. “Look, you: there are enough stars for everyone tonight, and among them shine the satellites, those counterfeit coins.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

172. “He thinks each day will be better than the next; he is wrong. He awakens the next morning and thinks it again; he is wrong. He thinks we are free to become our true selves, that we are free to love as we choose. A mindset so UnitedStatesian, you could serve it with ketchup. But, friends, you cannot live on ketchup.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

173. “Is there a bucket of blood hanging high in the auditorium rafters, waiting to be dropped.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

174. “He is shown to a car as small, bland, and white as a hospital dessert.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

175. “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

176. “You know the real problem with America?” He does not wait for Less to speak. “All of your elbowing, unblushing, ‘can-do’ achievements. And nobody ever says, ‘Wait! What if we’re wrong?’ ” “I ask that all the time,” Less replies. “I don’t mean you, my darling. I mean America. What if it’s wrong? The whole idea?” Less searches for an answer; the notion has never occurred to him. “What if the whole idea of America is wrong?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

177. “Back then, these journeys all seemed as random as the stars in the sky; only now can he see the zodiac turning above his life. Here, rising, comes the Scorpion.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

178. “Boredom is essential for writers. It is the only time they get to write.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

179. “Slowly, the impossible dawned on him, and with terror he was forced to look deep within himself, as we all someday must, and ask: Am I the only frigid homosexual in New York? It turned out he was. So he left. So: Bad gay?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

180. “He is not the best. But he is the best I ever had.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

181. “Just as a gay couple cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Marrakech, he thinks, two men, best friends, cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Chicago.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

182. “She is talking about the birds, awakening in harmony and bedding down in discord.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

183. “It feels possible that memory will never be finished with this moment. Then they step apart.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

184. “Mescal turns out to be a drink that tastes as if someone has put their cigarette out in it. You drink it, he is informed, with an orange slice that has been coated in toasted worms.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

185. “Less takes one last look at the ancient castle of mud and straw, remade every year or so as the rains erode the walls, plastered and replastered so that nothing remains of the old ksar except its former pattern. Something like a living creature of which not a cell is left of the original.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

186. “No one has ever been hopelessly in love with me.” “No,” Carlos says. “You always gave them hope, didn’t you?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

187. “Too wistful. Too poignant. These walk-around-town-books, these day-in-the-life stories. I know writers love them. But I think it’s hard to feel bad for this Swift fellow of yours. I mean, he has the best life of anyone I know.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

188. “Mescal turns out to be a drink that tastes as if someone has put their cigarette out in it.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

189. “The Russian novelist pulls his lush eyebrows together like the parts of a modular sofa.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

190. “We are all having different experiences.”

— Andrew Sean Greer