Sarah Manguso > Quotes

“Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us — by taking everything.”
― Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

“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.”
― Sarah Manguso

“It was a failure of my imagination that made me keep leaving people. 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. Short tragic love stories that had once interested me no longer did. What interested me was the kind of love to which the person dedicates herself for so long, she no longer remembers quite how it began.”
― Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

“The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn't that they'll remember; it's that you'll remember.”
― Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments: Essays

“Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments—an inability to accept life as ongoing.”
― Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

“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.”
― Sarah Manguso

“The trouble with setting goals is that you’re constantly working toward what you used to want.”
― Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments

“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.”
― Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay

“You'll never know what your mother went through.”
― Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments: Essays

“If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it.”
― Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay

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

“Difficulty becomes familiar, at least, if no less difficult.”
― Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments: Essays

“Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws ... I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn't a character flaw.”
― Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

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

“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.”
― Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay

“To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget.

A memorable sandwich, an unmemorable flight of stairs. A memorable bit of conversation surrounded by chatter that no one records.”
― Sarah Manguso

“When I was twenty-three I began seeing a psychotherapist because I couldn’t bear the idea that, after the end of an affair, all our shared memories might be expunged from the mind of the other, that they might no longer exist outside my own belief they’d happened. I couldn’t accept the possibility of being the only one who would remember everything about those moments as carefully as I tried to remember them. My life, which exists mostly in the memories of the people I’ve known, is deteriorating at the rate of physiological decay. A color, a sensation, the way someone said a single word—soon it will all be gone. In a hundred and fifty years no one alive will ever have known me. Being forgotten like that, entering that great and ongoing blank, seems more like death than death.”
― Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

“The trouble with comparing yourself to others is that there are too many others. Using all others as your control group, all your worst fears and all your fondest hopes are at once true. You are good; you are bad; you are abnormal; you are just like everyone else.”
― Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments: Essays

“Some people will punish you merely for witnessing their weakness. Even if they sought you out and asked for help. Even if you helped. Especially if you helped.”
― Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments: Essays

“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.”
― Sarah Manguso, Siste Viator

“Only a fire can teach you what survives a fire. No, it teaches you what can survive that fire.”
― Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments: Essays

“Depression is hard to describe not just because it is complex and abstract but also because it occupies the part of us capable of describing things.”
― Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments: Essays

“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, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

“And then I think I don't need to write anything down ever again. Nothing's gone, not really. Everything that's ever happened has left its little wound.”
― Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

“Biographies should also contain the events that failed to foreshadow.”
― Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments: Essays

“I like writing that is unsummarizable, a kernel that cannot be condensed, that must be uttered exactly as it is.”
― Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments: Essays

“What is grief for? Mechanical explanation: Pain directs my attention to an injury or insult and subsides once the injury or insult is mended or neutralized. The pain of loss subsides if I replace what I lost or adjust permanently to accommodate the loss. Evolutionary explanation: Grief is a byproduct of attachment in social animals. The grief of loss teaches me to prevent potential loss of kin. Religious explanation: God, the engineer of all that happens, knows best. All life is but a gauntlet ere I live again in heaven. Real explanation: Love abides. There is no other solace. •”
― Sarah Manguso, The Guardians: An Elegy

“Sometimes a single sentence can be enough to fill the imagination completely. And sometimes a book's title is enough.”
― Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments: Essays

“I've written whole books in order to avoid writing other books.”
― Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments: Essays

“I wanted to remember what I could bear to remember and convince myself it was all there was.”
― Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary