Top 180 Andrew Sean Greer Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “For a fifty-year-old man, the boredom of lying convalescent in bed is rivaled only by sitting in church.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

162. “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

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

164. “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

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

— 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. “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

170. “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

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

172. “Why didn’t he say yes?”

— Andrew Sean Greer

173. “Be in love, you will be happy.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

176. “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

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

183. “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

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

185. “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

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

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

— Andrew Sean Greer

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Andrew Sean Greer