Quotes from Want Not

Jonathan Miles ·  403 pages

Rating: (2.6K votes)


“This is our condition . We do not solve problems. We replace them with other problems.”
― Jonathan Miles, quote from Want Not


“…wondering, not for the first time, if there was a kind of dark bliss built into dementia: an immunity from death and abandonment, a way of fixing a point in time so that nothing can change, nothing can be rewritten, no one can leave.”
― Jonathan Miles, quote from Want Not


“But now . . . he was not yet at the age, like his father, when life shifts to past tense, when what is becomes what was and all the other verbs defining your existence go slumping into the preterite, crusted with apophonic alternations (I sing calcifying into I sang), and you can do nothing but marvel or wince at the irredeemable, irreversible arc of it—not yet. On this November night he was fifty-four years old. By no means, he told himself, was he beyond the future tense. But he could feel the past tense gaining on him, like the cold seeping into his back and dusting his face. He licked it off his lips and stood up. He had work to do.”
― Jonathan Miles, quote from Want Not


“But then he decided it wasn’t an irony, it was merely the broken gears of time, or the way life can feed you when you’re full (youth) and starve you when you’re hungry (midlife).”
― Jonathan Miles, quote from Want Not


“Alexis was at that age, seventeen, when mothers come into view as tyrants or imbeciles or both.”
― Jonathan Miles, quote from Want Not



“This is our condition. We do not solve problems. We replace them with other problems.”
― Jonathan Miles, quote from Want Not


About the author

Jonathan Miles
Born place: The United States
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