Sarah Manguso
Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Moving
If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it.Collection: Thinking
Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little.Collection: Moving
Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing.Collection: Anxiety
This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.Collection: Suffering
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.Collection: Defense
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Running
The only thing I've consistently been interested in in the last twenty-five years is writing very short texts. That continues to interest me as a project, to contain some part of reality, which is chaotic by definition, in a contained space. I like small apartments. I like getting rid of stuff. I went through my files yesterday and spent hours shredding things. It was great.Collection: Writing
I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.Collection: People
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.Collection: Arrows
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.Collection: Moving
Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity.Collection: Dancing
I see no reason not to write whatever comes to me.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Book
If I'm not writing a thing, depression might be looming.Collection: Writing