Brian Morton Quotes
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He was a muted egomaniac—he tried to keep his grandiosity under cover—but an egomaniac nonetheless.
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It wasn’t that she wanted to seduce him—not literally. But flirting was a pleasure, and flirting with intelligent people—male or female—was one of the supreme pleasures of life.
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You seize your freedom in a spirit of rebelliousness, exuberance, defiant joy. But to live that choice -- over the weeks and months and years to come -- requires different qualities. It requires that you turn hard, turn rigid. Because it isn't a choice that the world encourages, you have to wear a suit of armor to defend it.
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What you are is a complicated girl with simple needs. You need your books and time to read, and you need a few friends and you need someone-not to take care of you, but to care for you. If you have all those things, you'll always be alright.
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Maybe it was three strikes, because not only was she an intellectual, she was a feminist. Which meant that if she ever managed to finish this book, reviewers...
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Two heavyset, rough-looking men were arguing about politics, and he was struck anew by a thought he used to have often when he lived here: there is no such thing as a French tough guy. A French tough guy, even if he’s tough as nails, speaks French, and therefore isn’t very tough at all. These men looked like boxers, but they were speaking a feminine language and sipping daintily from tiny espresso cups. Schiller, six-foot-something and wide, always felt terribly manly in France, the land of fragile men.
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Maybe a man can change. It helps when you've been injured, when you've been dislodged from the complacent routines of your life. Sometimes it takes an injury to make you see what you share with others.
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A man can't understand how a woman feels--how she can offer up her entire life to him. The man thinks she's bringing him a burden. He doesn't understand that she's trying to give him a gift.
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What you are he said, is a complicated girl with simple needs. You need your books and time to read, and you need a few friends, and you need someone not to take care of you, but to care for you. If you have all those things, you will always be all right.
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The Refusal of the Keys: it seemed like something from mythology, from medieval legend.
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The people she admired in his books were people who walked away from the lives that other people expected them to live—Ellen in his first novel, the bohemian painters in his second.
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You travel side by side through the life you share, and you come to think you know each other all too well. But if each of us enters the afterlife alone, and is asked to give an accounting, asked to speak of how one lived and what one lived for, then the accounting Daniel gave of his life might involve trials of which she knew nothing, sufferings of which he'd never spoken and that had left no outer mark.
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You have an unfinished quality that in a person of your age is an achievement.
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What appalled Schiller about these libraries was that they featured nothing off the beaten track: no tattered paperbacks; no evidence of distinctive personal interests; no tokens of long intellectual detours passionately explored.
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This is what an artist is, she thought. This is the temperament you need to spend a whole day tinkering with a sentence, making sure that both the meaning and the music are right; to spend three or seven or ten years working on a book.
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It's probably true that you're forging your own character during every minute of every day, with every decision you make, but there are some moments in which this is more clear than in others.
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A trip to the market in the morning to buy bread, an afternoon spent reading in a cafe—nothing was routine; a strange place helped you find the poetry in everyday life.
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The primary human need, he decided—stronger than the need for food or sex or love—is the need for recognition, the need to make a mark in the world.
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You understood me; you helped me understand myself. If reading a book is a naked encounter between two people, I have known you nakedly for years.
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Be realistic! Demand the impossible!
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Even in your smallest gestures, you express your sense of honor, if you have one.
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The river was so blue it seemed to be breathing.
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But his life consisted, for the most part, of writing and reading. He wrote during the day, read at night, went to bed early, and did the same thing the next day.
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She had a moment of engulfing sadness about this, about the way that even when we’re living through tragedy, the language we reach for, the only language available to us, is secondhand.