Sarah Manguso

“Nothing, nobody matters. And yet the world is full of love”

“You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing. You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness into brightness.”

“I don’t know how I stay alive. What I do know is that there is a light, far above us, that goes out when we die,and that in Hell there is a gray tulip that grows without any sun. It reminds me of everything I failed at,and I water it carefully. It is all I have to remind me of you.”

“What about those yogis who can lie down on a bed of nails, then arise, streaming blood, then stop the flow of blood from each wound individually with the power of their minds? Isn't frailty often a choice?”

“If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it.”

“My friend Isabel says, When you’re writing even a short novel, with at least a couple of subplots, and God only knows how many characters, your brain holds the volume of it beyond the ability of your consciousness.Of course.”

“Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.”

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

“Everything that happens is the last time it happens. We see things only as their own fatal brightness and there is nothing after that brightness.”

“My existence shrank from an arrow of light pointing into the future forever to a speck of light that was the present moment. I got better at living in that point of light, making the world into that point. I paid close attention to it. I loved it very much.”

“Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.”