Top 50 Max Porter Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone. She.”

— Max Porter

2. “Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?”

— Max Porter

3. “Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.”

— Max Porter

4. “Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project.”

— Max Porter

5. “It is everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.”

— Max Porter

6. “Grief felt fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar. I was cold.”

— Max Porter

7. “Perhaps if Crow taught him anything it was a constant balancing. For want of a less dirty word: faith.”

— Max Porter

8. “I remember a story about an Irish warrior who killed his son by mistake but when he realised he didn’t mind that much because it served the son right.”

— Max Porter

9. “The sound of her voice was stinging, like a moon-dragged starvation surging into every hopeless raw vacant pore, undoing, exquisite undoing.”

— Max Porter

10. “I remember being scared that something must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes.”

— Max Porter

11. “For a souvenir, for a warning, for a lick of night in the morning.”

— Max Porter

12. “We are but pitiful narrative creatures... obsessing over the agony of not knowing. Sisyphus, Atlas, Echo, all those poor souls, now us. It is the oldest story of them all; never-ending pain.”

— Max Porter

13. “Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. We can do things other characters can’t, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God.”

— Max Porter

14. “I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me.”

— Max Porter

15. “We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.”

— Max Porter

16. “The whole city is my missing her.”

— Max Porter

17. “We were smack bang in the middle, years from the finish, taking nothing for granted. I.”

— Max Porter

18. “After the advent of laser surgery but before puberty, before self-consciousness, before secondary school, before money, time or gender got their teeth in. Before language was a trap, when it was a maze. Before.”

— Max Porter

19. “And she laughed, and said she understood, and then off she drifted in that nice way she has. Responsive to the light, I would call it. The type of person who is that little bit more akin to the weather than most people, more obviously made of the same atoms as the earth than most people these days seem to be. Which explains Lanny.”

— Max Porter

20. “Again. I beg everything again.”

— Max Porter

21. “Caught baffled by the perplexing slow-release of sadness for ever and ever and ever. Which.”

— Max Porter

22. “Ghosts do not haunt, they regress. Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of trees or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refuge in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.”

— Max Porter

23. “I’m a million cameras, even when I’m sleeping, clicking, clicking, every second something is growing and changing. We are little arrogant flashes in a grand magnificent scheme.”

— Max Porter

24. “They offer me a space on the sofa next to them and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me. CROW.”

— Max Porter

25. “I flung the duvet off and flailed and swung and spat at you but you were elsewhere and I had to fall asleep crushed between what you’d said and what I thought.”

— Max Porter

26. “And then our Mum and Dad were in love and they were truly dry-stone strong and durable and people speak of ease and joy and spontaneity and the fact that their two smells became one smell, our smell. Us.”

— Max Porter

27. “For a souvenir, for a warning, for a lick of night in the morning. For a little break in the mourning. I will give you something to think about, I whispered. He woke up and didn’t see me against the blackness of his trauma.”

— Max Porter

28. “Once upon a time there were two boys who purposefully misremembered things about their father. It made them feel better if ever they forgot things about their mother.”

— Max Porter

29. “A howling sorry which is yes which is thank you which is onwards.”

— Max Porter

30. “There is a fascinating constant exchange between Crow’s natural self and his civilised self, between the scavenger and the philosopher, the goddess of complete being and the black stain, between Crow and his birdness. It seems to me to be the self-same exchange between mourning and living, then and now. I could learn a lot from him.”

— Max Porter

31. “Lanny would be thrilled to be compared to a March hare, leaping in the long grass, boxing his own reflection. A bringer of strange dreams, skipping about the wide open village.”

— Max Porter

32. “There is no such thing as trust. It’s a pernicious lie.”

— Max Porter

33. “This is what commuting is. Small pleasures coaxed from playing the routine like a game. Little tricks of the part-time countryman. It might be soul-destroying. I might be a bit pitiful. I don’t know.”

— Max Porter

34. “Dead Papa Toothwort wakes from his standing nap an acre wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter.”

— Max Porter

35. “Just be kind and look out for your brother.”

— Max Porter

36. “The friends and family who had been hanging around being kind had gone home to their own lives. When the children went to bed the flat had no meaning, nothing moved.”

— Max Porter

37. “There’s a feather on my pillow.”

— Max Porter

38. “Before language was a trap, when it was a maze.”

— Max Porter

39. “You could give her a hug but she’d bite your arm off.”

— Max Porter

40. “Long live imagined animals, the need, the capacity.”

— Max Porter

41. “Moving on, as a concept, was mooted, a year or two after, by friendly men on behalf of their wellintentioned wives. Women who loved us. Women who knew me as a child.”

— Max Porter

42. “It’s for the whole village and anyone who finds it. It’s to make them fall in love with everything. It’s my biggest project so far.”

— Max Porter

43. “None of us actually feel anything for anybody. It’s all pretend.”

— Max Porter

44. “The type of person who is that little bit more akin to the weather than most people, more obviously made of the same atoms as the earth than most people these days seem to be.”

— Max Porter

45. “He could learn to speak this language: night-end.”

— Max Porter

46. “I have a drawing by Lanny stuck above my desk. It’s me in a cape, flying above a skyline and it says, ‘Where does Dad go every day? Nobody knows.”

— Max Porter

47. “But darling we’ve talked about this so often, you cannot fix the way the world is broken all on your own.”

— Max Porter

48. “He thinks our souls split off and wander around for a bit, seeing things properly. He thinks we see for the first time how things really work, how close we are to plants, how everything is connected, and we get it, finally, but only for a second. We see shapes and patterns and it’s incredibly beautiful like the best art ever, with maths and science and music and feelings all at once, the whole of everything. And then we just dissolve and become air.”

— Max Porter

49. “This tragedy will be the story of your whole life, but it’s your life and you can sleep forever and ever if needs be.”

— Max Porter

50. “I’ve drawn her unpicked, ribs splayed stretched like a xylophone with the dead birds playing tunes on her bones.”

— Max Porter