Nothing happens in a moment. Nothing happens quickly. If you think something’s happened quickly, you’re looking at only a part of it. Firing a rifle shot seems to happen quickly, but what about the movement of the trigger finger? What about the decision to fire the rifle? What about all your careful…
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Sarah Manguso
Sarah Manguso (born 1974) is an American writer and poet. In 2007, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), was named an “Editors’ Choice” title by the New York Times Sunday Book Review and a 2008 "Best Nonfiction Book of the Year" by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her book Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (2015) was also named a New York Times “Editors’ Choice.” 2Life She received her B.A. from Harvard University and her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has taught creative writing at the Pratt Institute and in the graduate program at The New School. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poems and prose have appeared in Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review. Her poems have appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry serie
Narratives in which one thing follows from the previous thing are usually imaginary.
Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of the self.
But to pay attention is to love everything.
Why do I need to read sixty minutes in the morning, and swim twenty laps in the afternoon, and write a thousand words at night, in order to feel that a twenty-four-hour period has been well used?
Depression doesn’t just steal the depressed person’s capacity for joy. It throws its mantle over everything he has ever done and everything he could ever do. The depressed person dies not to save himself from the world but to save the world from himself. In this case the word depression makes clear…
Some people ditch friends and lovers because it’s easier to get new ones than to resolve conflicts with the old ones, particularly if resolving a conflict requires one to admit error or practice mercy. I’m describing an asshole. But what if the asshole thinks he’s ditching an asshole?
Happiness begins to deteriorate once it is named.
The trouble with setting goals is that you're constantly working towards what you used to want.
Every success story can be told in a series of failures.
Every new routine begins in desperation. And ends in a different desperation.
Anger conceals pain. It also conceals love.
Crying turns to laughing and laughing to crying - if the storm is intense enough, all the fuses in the house blow.
There were people I wanted so much before I had them that the entire experience of having them was grief for my old hunger.
The aftershocks of the first time last forever. One might take this as permission not to finish anything.
People congregate according to their relative levels of luck.
Preferable to accepting one's insignificance is imagining the others hate you.
Some people will punish you merely for witnessing their weaknesses.
Interesting people aren't interested in appearing interesting.
My least favorite received idea about writing is that one must find one's voice, as if it's there inside you, ready to be turned on like a player piano. Like character, its very existence depends on interaction with the world.