Charles Baxter

“I am glimmerless.”

“A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.”

“The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.”

“Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.”

“What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.”

“When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.”

“There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.”

“Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn't have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us.”

“She'd like to say something about the metaphors of space. She won't, but she'd like to. In many religions, the sun is viewed as an analogue to God, and in some Near Eastern cults, the fire cults that interested Nietzsche, the sun is a diety, the origin of all energy, heat, light, and life. A masculine force, this sun, countered by the feminine lucent moon, mutable, pale pink at the horizon, grayish white overhead, and silver in daytime. The moon is a friend to women. Its attraction, its capacity to pull objects toward itself, is traditionally a metaphor for womanly force. Lovers know and understand the moon as a sign for love: a cliché, certainly, but one that does not wear out. "The Moon," they whisper, infinitely.”