Top 120 Sarah Manguso Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Choose one: chronic disappointment or lowering your expectations to the point where nothing can disappoint you.”

— Sarah Manguso

2. “Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments – an inability to accept life as ongoing.”

— Sarah Manguso

3. “Assume that the most annoying person you know, the one who won’t leave you alone, is in love with you.”

— Sarah Manguso

4. “Failure is good preparation for success, which comes as a pleasant surprise, but success is poor preparation for failure.”

— Sarah Manguso

5. “The fastest way to revise a piece of work is to send it, late at night, to someone whose opinion you fear. Then rewrite it, praying you’ll finish in time to send a new version by morning.”

— Sarah Manguso

6. “And then I think I don’t need to write anything down ever again. Nothing’s gone, not really. Everything that’s ever happened has left its little wound.”

— Sarah Manguso

7. “I knew I couldn’t replicate my whole life in language.”

— Sarah Manguso

8. “The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember.”

— Sarah Manguso

9. “Depression is hard to describe not just because it is complex and abstract but also because it occupies the part of us capable of describing things.”

— Sarah Manguso

10. “Whatever you’re feeling, billions already have. Feel for them.”

— Sarah Manguso

11. “Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us – by taking everything.”

— Sarah Manguso

12. “Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws... I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn’t a character flaw.”

— Sarah Manguso

13. “Like a vase, a heart breaks once. After that, it just yields to its flaws.”

— Sarah Manguso

14. “Progress takes place in the dark, when you aren’t trying.”

— Sarah Manguso

15. “Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.”

— Sarah Manguso

16. “Some people will punish you merely for witnessing their weakness. Even if they sought you out and asked for help. Even if you helped. Especially if you helped.”

— Sarah Manguso

17. “Some people love only those they can condescend to, those they can tenderly despise.”

— Sarah Manguso

18. “Everything that happens is the last time it happens. We see things only as their own fatal brightness and there is nothing after that brightness.”

— Sarah Manguso

19. “Respect the one-hit wonder not for his one hit but for all the days he must have suffered afterward, trying for another.”

— Sarah Manguso

20. “The first time you love someone who doesn’t love you back it seems wrong, not morally but logically, a river flowing up a mountain. How can such a feeling be wrong? You’ll return to that very river, as many times as it takes.”

— Sarah Manguso

21. “Inner beauty can fade, too.”

— Sarah Manguso

22. “Sometimes a single sentence can be enough to fill the imagination completely. And sometimes a book’s title is enough.”

— Sarah Manguso

23. “There will come a time when people decide you’ve had enough of your grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you.”

— Sarah Manguso

24. “Anger conceals pain. It also conceals love.”

— Sarah Manguso

25. “Choose one: chronic disappointment or lowering your expectations to the point where nothing can disappoint you. But consider also that you might miss feeling disappointed.”

— Sarah Manguso

26. “You can choose your friends but not your friendships.”

— Sarah Manguso

27. “The trouble with comparing yourself to others is that there are too many others. Using all others as your control group, all your worst fears and all your fondest hopes are at once true. You are good; you are bad; you are abnormal; you are just like everyone else.”

— Sarah Manguso

28. “It takes time to recover from having run somewhere. But sometimes one just wants to run. Anywhere.”

— Sarah Manguso

29. “Nothing, nobody matters. And yet the world is full of love.”

— Sarah Manguso

30. “Some things are so horrible they need to be hidden right after they become visible. They are too horrible to be seen except very slowly, or in very small amounts. Or they are too beautiful.”

— Sarah Manguso

31. “It’s impossible to fail if one doesn’t know how the end should look. And it’s impossible to succeed. But it’s possible to enjoy.”

— Sarah Manguso

32. “To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget.”

— Sarah Manguso

33. “If you think something’s happened quickly, you’re looking at only a part of it.”

— Sarah Manguso

34. “You’ll never know what your mother went through.”

— Sarah Manguso

35. “It isn’t so much that geniuses make it look easy; it’s that they make it look it fast.”

— Sarah Manguso

36. “It was a failure of my imagination that made me keep leaving people. All I could see in the world were beginnings and endings: moments to survive, record, and, once recorded, safely forget. I knew I was getting somewhere when I began losing interest in the beginnings and the ends of things. Short tragic love stories that had once interested me no longer did. What interested me was the kind of love to which the person dedicates herself for so long, she no longer remembers quite how it began.”

— Sarah Manguso

37. “Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.”

— Sarah Manguso

38. “Outsiders pretend to be insiders, and it makes them unlikable. Insiders pretend to be outsiders, and we love to play along.”

— Sarah Manguso

39. “I read obituaries every day to learn what sorts of lives are available to us, to see an entire life compressed into a few column inches, to fit the whole story in my eye at once.”

— Sarah Manguso

40. “I reread my favorite books to make sure they’re still perfect, but rereading them wears away at their perfection.”

— Sarah Manguso

41. “Being forgotten like that, entering that great and ongoing blank, seems more like death than death.”

— Sarah Manguso

42. “I keep three kinds of books: those I want to read, those I want to reread, and those I want to reopen just to confirm how bad they are.”

— Sarah Manguso

43. “The memory and maybe the fact of every kiss start disappearing the moment the two mouths part.”

— Sarah Manguso

44. “Biographies should also contain the events that failed to foreshadow.”

— Sarah Manguso

45. “Slowly, slowly, I accumulate sentences. I have no idea what I’m doing until suddenly it reveals itself, almost done.”

— Sarah Manguso

46. “One must be able to empathize with a suicide yet not become one.”

— Sarah Manguso

47. “Some people care most about exhibiting how much they care.”

— Sarah Manguso

48. “Interesting people aren’t interested in appearing interesting.”

— Sarah Manguso

49. “When a student surpasses my expectations, I feel proud and betrayed.”

— Sarah Manguso

50. “What about those yogis who can lie down on a bed of nails, then arise, streaming blood, then stop the flow of blood from each wound individually with the power of their minds? Isn’t frailty often a choice?”

— Sarah Manguso