Quotes from The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“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

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“To understand my doctor’s error, let’s employ Bayes’s method. The first step is to define the sample space. We could include everyone who has ever taken an HIV test, but we’ll get a more accurate result if we employ a bit of additional relevant information about me and consider only heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who have taken the test. (We’ll see later what kind of difference this makes.) Now that we know whom to include in the sample space, let’s classify the members of the space. Instead of boy and girl, here the relevant classes are those who tested positive and are HIV-positive (true positives), those who tested positive but are not positive (false positives), those who tested negative and are HIV-negative (true negatives), and those who tested negative but are HIV-positive (false negatives). Finally, we ask, how many people are there in each of these classes? Suppose we consider an initial population of 10,000. We can estimate, employing statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that in 1989 about 1 in those 10,000 heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who got tested were infected with HIV.6 Assuming that the false-negative rate is near 0, that means that about 1 person out of every 10,000 will test positive due to the presence of the infection. In addition, since the rate of false positives is, as my doctor had quoted, 1 in 1,000, there will be about 10 others who are not infected with HIV but will test positive anyway. The other 9,989 of the 10,000 men in the sample space will test negative. Now let’s prune the sample space to include only those who tested positive. We end up with 10 people who are false positives and 1 true positive. In other words, only 1 in 11 people who test positive are really infected with HIV.”
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“As I swallowed the last bite of my bagel, my fear gave way to anger. “And just what the hell did he mean by ‘my erratic behavior’?”
Ian just looked at me. Yasha and Calvin stared straight ahead and didn’t say a word.
I glared at all of them.”
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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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