Andrew Sean Greer · 267 pages
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“We are each the love of someone's life.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli
“People always say the greatest love story in the world is Romeo and Juliet. I don't know. At fourteen, at seventeen, I remember, it takes over your whole life." Alice was worked up now, her face flushed and alive, her hands cutting through the night-blooming air. "You think about nobody, nothing else, you don't eat or sleep, you just think about this . . . it's overwhelming. I know, I remember. But is it love? Like how you have cheap brandy when you're young and you think it's marvelous, just so elegant, and you don't know, you don't know anything . . . because, you've never tasted anything better. You're fourteen."
It was no time for lying. "I think it's love"
You do?"
I think maybe it's the only true love."
She was about to say something, and stopped herself. I'd surprised her, I suppose. "How sad if you're right," she said, closing her eyes for a moment. "Because we never end up with them. How sad and stupid if that's how it works.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli
“It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli
“It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli
“Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli
“Here was a thing that would grow old; here was a thing that would turn beautiful and lose that beauty, that would inherit the grace but also the bad ear and flawed figure of her mother, that would smile too much and squint too often and spend the last decades of her life creaming away the wrinkles made in youth until she finally gave up and wore a collar of pears to hide a wattle; here was the ordinary sadness of the world.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli
“Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli
“As the Japanese will tell you, one can train a rose to grow through anything, to grow through a nautilus even, but it must be done with tenderness.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli
“It is almost another kind of love, being loved. It is the same heat but from another room; it is the same sound but from a high window...”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli
“The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli
“We have no heart at seventeen. We think we do; we think we have been cursed with a holy, bloated thing that twitches at the name we adore, but it is not a heart because though it will forfeit anything in the world-the mind, the body, the future, even the last lonely hour it has-it will not sacrifice itself.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli
“years; they had exchanged just one letter, one glance in”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli
Andrew Sean Greer
Born place: in Washington, D.C., The United States
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“I love that girl, Bertie," he went on, when he'd finished coughing.
"Yes. Nice girl, of course."
He eyed me with deep loathing.
"Don't speak of her in that horrible casual way. She's an angel. An angel!”
― P.G. Wodehouse, quote from The Inimitable Jeeves
“Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage, or in terrorist activities, or in genocide? I think we can put a big yes down for all of the above.”
“You planning on ratting me out to the US authorities?”
“I thought about it for a fanciful moment,” I replied, pushing the travel documents back across the desk. “I also thought about walking you through the ‘something to declare’ aisle singing the North Korean national anthem, but I doubted anyone would find it funny.”
― Claire North, quote from Touch
“Sometimes I think evil is a tangible thing - with wave lengths, just as sound and light have.”
― Richard Connell, quote from The Most Dangerous Game
“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
“Often you shall think your road impassable, sombre and companionless. Have will and plod along; and round each curve you shall find a new companion.”
― Mikhail Naimy, quote from The Book of Mirdad: The Strange Story of a Monastery Which Was Once Called the Ark
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