Top 120 Sarah Manguso Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Sarah Manguso

103. “A woman I knew was so attached to the idea of having a terrible secret, she told me the same secret three times, each time as if for the first time.”

— Sarah Manguso

104. “On winter mornings the light spread like a watery broth over the landscape.”

— Sarah Manguso

105. “I understood things then. Somehow I became confused in the ensuing years.”

— Sarah Manguso

106. “There are no memories, just artifacts. And they’re all lying.”

— Sarah Manguso

107. “Maybe that’s what I should be wishing for instead.”

— Sarah Manguso

108. “I go to another room, hoping someone will notice me, but I stay silent out of loyalty or fear.”

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

111. “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

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

— Sarah Manguso

113. “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

114. “But I’m doing her a favor, letting her escape her suffering into mine.”

— Sarah Manguso

115. “Those whose every act is praised are handicapped by adoration. They grow stunted, shrivel up, lose the impulse to continue. Praise can kill.”

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

118. “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

119. “They are preparing to go to war, and with so little time to waste, they say what they mean.”

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

121. “I like to visit with the exhausted girl who once was me.”

— Sarah Manguso

122. “With each of his new misfortunes I’m punished further, with secret guilt, for wishing all of it on him, long ago.”

— Sarah Manguso

123. “Does the first time matter that much?”

— Sarah Manguso

124. “I hadn’t remembered that in decades. That particular quiet.”

— Sarah Manguso

125. “My friend who runs marathons, throws elaborate parties, sews quilts for everyone she knows, works full-time, and has three children does all of this not in spite of her useless husband but because of him.”

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

127. “She died by her own hand, but she was as brave as a soldier before a firing squad. She faced it. Whatever it was, she had been facing it for a long time.”

— Sarah Manguso

128. “I knew I was grown up when I spent time with them and felt not just the weight of my old memories but the weight of theirs, from when they were children.”

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

131. “I suspect competence follows from an ability to believe oneself competent.”

— Sarah Manguso

132. “People congregate according to their relative levels of luck.”

— Sarah Manguso

133. “I’m stuck in a waiting room with the TV on the same channel all day, and I’m never called in for my appointment.”

— Sarah Manguso

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

— Sarah Manguso

135. “Worry is impatience for the next horror.”

— Sarah Manguso

136. “I closed my own eyes for a moment and recovered, but incompletely. I can’t forget how close insanity is, how easy it might be to drive off the shoulder of the road into a place where no one would ever find me.”

— Sarah Manguso