Brian Morton Quotes
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So much of human life is animal life: we respond to each other as animals.
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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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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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He was a muted egomaniac—he tried to keep his grandiosity under cover—but an egomaniac nonetheless.
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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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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.
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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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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 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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Be realistic! Demand the impossible!
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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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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 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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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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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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You have an unfinished quality that in a person of your age is an achievement.
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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.
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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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She’d once heard that when you have heart surgery—your chest sawed open, your ribs cracked, the action of your heart replaced for hours by the action of a machine—the suffering you undergo for the next few months, that peculiarly spiritual sorrow, is the sorrow of a body in mourning for itself, a body that believes it has died.
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We wish for a symmetry of feeling, but we rarely get it. It is painful to be the one who loves more, and painful to be the one who loves less.
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The idea that there were documents and recordings that couldn't be found online had never really occurred to her.
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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.
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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.