Quotes by "Andrew Sean Greer"

A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.

Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.

When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.

Come si definisce il tempo quando non ci siamo? Per esempio, quando abbiamo bevuto tanto che i minuti si rincorrono con in mezzo dei vuoti, o perdiamo per strada ore intere, e però eravamo lì, abbiamo detto e fatto cose, e siamo ritenuti responsabili di quello che è stato. Oppure quel breve istante in cui al telefono ci risvegliamo e ci ritroviamo nel pieno di una conversazione, e dobbiamo bluffare per riprendere il filo. Come si chiamano questi vuoti temporali? Quale parte di noi continua a funzionare in quei momenti? Dobbiamo essere ritenuti responsabili di quel che facciamo? E infine: chi siamo quando non siamo noi stessi?

My grandmother wore a beehive hairdo even when it was out of fashion.

I think what shaped me was I had two parents who were scientists, and especially, they were great readers. They had both grown up in sort of rural parts of the South and were oddballs where they grew up. They were budding intellectuals.

My mother is a southern lady with short dark hair and a wary, blue-eyed smile. She is also an experimental chemist and teaches a college course entitled The Chemistry of Cooking.

My mom is an experimental chemist and physicist, so she is a cut-and-dried, nuts-and-bolts kind of woman, and my dad is a theoretical chemist, so we were definitely raised with his philosophical point of view: imaginary numbers and dimensions beyond our own. That's the kind of thing we would talk about.

Definitely for writing, what inspires me is poetry, which I have next to me all the time because I think they're doing what I'm doing, but much harder, more condensed. It's the same job, but they're more talented. All of them. So I just steal openly from them.

I'm not despairing of love at all.

Human love and desire is my bag.

An elephant funeral makes me weep every time, and so does an ad with a kid leaving home for college.

Science fiction writers, when I was a kid, were a big deal.

I was raised Unitarian, and my mother said she took us to church so that we wouldn't get religious later in life.