Sarah Manguso Quotes

Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little.

I don’t write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn’t poetry. It’s prose.

If I’m not writing a thing, depression might be looming.

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear.

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.

The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know.

If you think something’s happened quickly, you’re looking at only a part of it.

Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments – an inability to accept life as ongoing.

Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.

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.

Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us – by taking everything

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.

This is suffering’s lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.

Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity.

The more you talk about something, the less accurate it gets.