Brian Morton Quotes
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The desire to learn from people was always bound up with the desire to seem special to them.
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The feminist girls she knew at Oberlin, her roommate among them, were the kind of people who made you feel bad for liking what you liked. Sometimes when Emily was tired or blue she liked to watch "When Harry Met Sally", or "Love Actually", or old episodes of "Friends", and at Oberlin she'd had to wait until her roommate had gone out or fallen asleep.
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Let’s listen again to Dencombe: 'Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.' I love the fact that he uses the word 'passion' and the word 'task' in the same sentence—the one so exalted, the other so commonplace. More than this, I love that he equates them. Our passion is our task. To follow the calling of art, to keep faith with it, to continue with your daily labors despite the frustrations, the distractions, and the other varieties of madness that will inevitably beset you—all this requires passion, but it also requires something else, something more down-to-earth. Call it steeliness. Call it persistence. Call it tenacity. Call it resilience. Call it devotion. Whatever you decide to call it, the ability to consecrate yourself to the daily task of art isn’t rooted in madness. As James knew, as Dencombe knew, it’s rooted in sanity.
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He wanted to live without distractions; he wanted to focus all the life-force he had left on this last book. But now it was hard to concentrate. There was something new in his life. There was the painful distraction of desire.
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If life had taught her anything—if she had a philosophy of life—it probably boiled down to that: Go with the skid.
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...life brings you everything at once. You can be in misery because of the misery of your daughter at the same time as you're exhilarated by a new romance, a romance that feels like the first act of a new life.
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You just sit down at the typewriter and follow the character around. It’s like being a detective. You write page after page after page just finding out who they are. You wait for them to do something interesting.
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His kisses were too rote; they were assembly-line kisses. She wanted complex kisses; she wanted each kiss to be a conversation.
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And we were driving there with Florence and Stella. I was complaining about having to go all the way up to Connecticut, and you said, ‘Look at it this way: we have two obligations to our old friends. We have to go to their weddings and we have to go to their funerals. With George, we’re halfway home.
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He was like a fireman of intellectual life, rescuing frail forgotten thinkers from the burning building of time.
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Subtlety and indirection are important tools, but you can't scale the highest peaks with these tools alone.
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The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories. Nothing has meaning in itself: all the objects in the world would be shards of bare mute blankness, spinning wildly out of orbit, if we didn't bind them together with stories.
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These friends were his anchor; they kept him from floating off into the uncharted realms of his own self-regard.
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People, Florence thought as she put on her shoes. What do I need them for again?
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But Ariel felt sure that every moment is indestructible, and that somewhere in the universe, tucked away in some hidden fold of time, their moment together still endured. Somewhere she was still a young girl, hurled about by life, confessing her troubles, and he was a calm older man, listening to her as her father couldn’t listen and telling her to have courage.
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One of the sad little secrets of the writing life is that it’s become like the movie business, where a movie has to “open big”; if a book hasn’t caught anybody’s interest in the first two weeks of its life, it’s not going to.
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I regretted it. But it can’t be avoided. A writer has to use everything he has. If you want to write, you have to be willing to be a son of a bitch sometimes.
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“Heather resented it that this woman was his daughter. How does a writer of the most subtle, serious fiction end up with a daughter who watches Oprah? I’d be a better daughter for him than she is.
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I know it sounds strange but it’s true. I mean that you’re open to life. You’re open to being surprised. You’re open to being changed by life. Most of us lose that quality in our twenties. I don’t know how you’ve managed to hang on to it, but you have.” The music was loud, and the people were loud.
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So much of human life is animal life: we respond to each other as animals.
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The thing is to let life assault you, make yourself as defenseless as you can. If it bruises you, don't protest. Love your fate.
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The parasite of art, the virus of art, never ceases to gnaw awat at your brain, never ceases to torture you with the knowledge that whatever you’re doing could be done more beautifully, more powerfully, more stirringly, more disturbingly, more deeply.
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Without her glasses Vivian did look a little frightening. She had tight sinewy strappy muscles and a face that was hardened and almost brutal - a face that might have been chiseled by a sculptor who had fallen out of love with the idea of beauty.
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She loved to return to the world of the book, a world in which people were willing to let go of everything in order to follow their passions.