Top 120 Sarah Manguso Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Happiness begins to deteriorate once it is named.”

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

53. “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

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

57. “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

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

60. “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

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

68. “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

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

72. “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

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

— Sarah Manguso

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

79. “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

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

— Sarah Manguso

81. “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

82. “His beauty is outrageous.”

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

88. “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

89. “Great talents encourage great incapacities, but maintaining an inability to cook an egg or drive a car won’t make you into a genius.”

— Sarah Manguso

90. “Dying young can really help an art career along. It’s the careerist’s ultimate paradox.”

— Sarah Manguso

91. “I realize I don’t envy them exactly; I envy a hybrid monster with some qualities of each woman but all of neither – a monster I dreamt up specifically to envy.”

— Sarah Manguso

92. “The quality that all last words share: the silence after.”

— Sarah Manguso

93. “I look at young people and marvel at their ignorance of what’s coming, and the old people look at me.”

— Sarah Manguso

94. “When I indulge in envy, I envy everyone who has ever achieved anything.”

— Sarah Manguso

95. “Preferable to accepting one’s insignificance is imagining the others hate you.”

— Sarah Manguso

96. “Some people always give excellent gifts. It is a talent. A gift. Unteachable.”

— Sarah Manguso

97. “My life felt unreal and I felt half-invested. I felt indistinct, like someone else’s dream.”

— Sarah Manguso

98. “You aren’t the same person after a good night’s sleep as you are after a sleepless night. But which person is you?”

— Sarah Manguso

99. “Giving up and submitting to suffering looks the same as achieving total detachment and surpassing the Buddha.”

— Sarah Manguso

100. “The most likable person you know just might be a sociopath.”

— Sarah Manguso