Top 120 Sarah Manguso Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I wanted to remember what I could bear to remember and convince myself it was all there was.”

— Sarah Manguso

52. “Happiness begins to deteriorate once it is named.”

— Sarah Manguso

53. “Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages.”

— Sarah Manguso

54. “I read sad stories to inoculate myself against grief. I watch action movies to identify with the quick-witted heroes. Both the same fantasy: I’ll escape the worst of it.”

— Sarah Manguso

55. “I tend to forget that my measurement of time is designed to distract me from what’s really happening.”

— Sarah Manguso

56. “I like writing that is unsummarizable, a kernel that cannot be condensed, that must be uttered exactly as it is.”

— Sarah Manguso

57. “I’ve written whole books in order to avoid writing other books.”

— Sarah Manguso

58. “My considerate friend insists on hearing about my troubles first, and after several minutes of excavation, I’m drowning in them and can’t sufficiently attend to hers. But I’m doing her a favor, letting her escape her suffering into mine.”

— Sarah Manguso

59. “The trouble with setting goals is that you’re constantly working toward what you used to want.”

— Sarah Manguso

60. “There truly are two kinds of people: you and everyone else.”

— Sarah Manguso

61. “Today was very full, but the problem isn’t today. It’s tomorrow. I’d be able to recover from today if it weren’t for tomorrow. There should be extra days, buffer days, between real days.”

— Sarah Manguso

62. “Some people wore their difference honestly, but my parents were liars, illegitimate Waitsfielders, their off-whiteness discovered only after the paint had dried. By the time I was born, the house had faded to the color of dirty snow.”

— Sarah Manguso

63. “Bad art is from no one to no one.”

— Sarah Manguso

64. “If you insist that people witness your beauty, they’ll watch it closely until it’s gone.”

— Sarah Manguso

65. “Difficulty becomes familiar, at least, if no less difficult.”

— Sarah Manguso

66. “Who seems a harmless fool to those above him is a malevolence to those beneath.”

— Sarah Manguso

67. “I’d never have guessed which people I’d still know by now.”

— Sarah Manguso

68. “There are good fathers and bad fathers, good sons and bad sons, good husbands and bad ones, but great friends are all alike. We choose them and keep them. We aren’t bound to them by anything but love.”

— Sarah Manguso

69. “I used to be twenty. Then I was twenty-one, twenty-two, and so on. And then I became a mother and could no longer even distinguish the difference between twenty-one and twenty-two or the difference between thirty-eight and thirty-nine.”

— Sarah Manguso

70. “On the page, these might look like the stones of a ruin, strewn by time and weather, but I was here.”

— Sarah Manguso

71. “Having a worst regret betrays your belief that one misstep caused all your undeserved misfortune.”

— Sarah Manguso

72. “No point in trying to explain myself to those who refuse to understand. I’ve already lost that game.”

— Sarah Manguso

73. “So many things I’ll never try again. People my age who are still trying – I don’t know where that energy comes from. Perhaps they’re unhappy. Perhaps I’m happy, but I never thought happiness would feel like this.”

— Sarah Manguso

74. “Achieve a goal and suffer its loss.”

— Sarah Manguso

75. “Weak men who fall into positions of power are dying to give it up to anyone who will take it. The poor player would throw the ball to someone on the other team just to be rid of the worry of what to do with it, of the dread that he would have to be a man of action for a moment.”

— Sarah Manguso

76. “If you want to know someone’s secret, don’t ask a thing. Just listen.”

— Sarah Manguso

77. “I tried to record each moment, but time isn’t made of moments; it contains moments. There is more to it than moments.”

— Sarah Manguso

78. “The most fervent kiss of my life was less than five seconds long more than ten years ago with someone else’s husband. It still hasn’t quite worn off.”

— Sarah Manguso

79. “I want to shed my fears one by one until there is nothing left of me.”

— Sarah Manguso

80. “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.”

— Sarah Manguso

81. “Another friend said, I want to write sentences that seem as if no one wrote them. The goal being the creation of a pure delivery system, without the distraction of a style. The goal being a form no one notices, the creation of what seems like pure feeling, not of what seems like a vehicle for a feeling. Language as pure experience, pure memory. I too wanted to achieve that impossible effect.”

— Sarah Manguso

82. “In sports, failure is outwardly observable, which is to say it is a sign – look, there it is, the tennis ball that bounced twice. In the rest of life, failure is mostly complex, nuanced, secret.”

— Sarah Manguso

83. “The affair is over, but at least things have gone somewhere, if only into oblivion. And maybe oblivion is what I wanted all along.”

— Sarah Manguso

84. “Perfect happiness is the privilege of deciding when things end. But then you have to find a new happiness.”

— Sarah Manguso

85. “There is another kind of suffering, though, a pure agony, free from thought.”

— Sarah Manguso

86. “If you go to Paris, you won’t find Paris; you’ll find yourself in Paris. Ditto anywhere else. You might as well stay home.”

— Sarah Manguso

87. “I was like that once, and I’m not like that anymore.”

— Sarah Manguso

88. “I was angry at the ghost for months, would shout at it to stop trying to scare me. Now I understand it’s just lonely.”

— Sarah Manguso

89. “His beauty is outrageous.”

— Sarah Manguso

90. “Once you’ve traveled far enough from where you began, it’s impossible to reconcile the present with the past.”

— Sarah Manguso

91. “It’s a self-obliteration that never stops and that no one notices.”

— Sarah Manguso

92. “The full moon is saying ‘O!’ But the sun is silent.”

— Sarah Manguso

93. “There must be birds that sing or fly better or worse than other birds of their species; I’ve never noticed any. But the birds have.”

— Sarah Manguso

94. “It’s easier to speak to a crowd, to stare into the spotlight, than it is to look into a human face.”

— Sarah Manguso

95. “But it felt so good, I kept doing it.”

— Sarah Manguso

96. “Sincerity that pure was impossible to include in my life then, and I had to turn away. It was like looking at the sun.”

— Sarah Manguso

97. “What fails to kill me will kill me eventually.”

— Sarah Manguso

98. “One of the great solaces of my life is that I no longer need to wonder whether I’ll have children.”

— Sarah Manguso

99. “The will can achieve some things, but one must exhaust one’s will in order to learn which things they are.”

— Sarah Manguso

100. “Not every narrative is an arc. The universe, for example, just keeps expanding.”

— Sarah Manguso