Jonathan Miles > Quotes

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

“I'm not sure the word "sorry" does anything justice. It's such a loose word isn't it? I mean how can one puny word encompass all the stuff you did - But also the, all the things you didn't do? It's the inactions that keep people up at night. The actions, they're done. They're done. It's the inactions that never go away. They just hang there. They ROT. How is sorry supposed to stretch across all that?”
― Jonathan Miles

“Had Stella been named anything else, and/or had we lived in any other city besides New Orleans, my desperate call would have been just my desperate call. In that alternate universe the neighbors might have peeked from behind the curtains but they wouldn't have laughed or, worse, joined in. But you simply cannot shout the name Stella while standing under a window in New Orleans and hope for anything like an authentic or even mildly earnest moment. Literature had beaten me to this moment, had staked its flag here first, and there was nothing I could do outside in that soupy, rain-drenched alleyway that could rise above sad parody. Perhaps if she'd been named Beatrice, or Katarzyna-maybe then my life would have turned out differently. Maybe then my voice would have roused her to the window, maybe then I could have told her that I was sorry, that I could be a better man, that I couldn't promise I knew everything it meant but I loved her. Instead I stared up at that black window, shutmouthed and impotent, blinking and reblinking my eyes to flush out the rainwater. "Stella," I whispered. The French have an expression: "Without literature life is hell." Yeah, well. Life with it bears its own set of flames.”
― Jonathan Miles, Dear American Airlines

“…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, Want Not

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

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

“He deplored the victims as much as their murderer but most of all deplored the hours they all spent crowding his head; his job, he felt, was merely to punctuate a sentence he wished he'd never read.
"From my earliest childhood," he says, "it was always my goal to live in a state of astonishment. But this was the wrong kind of astonishment. This was astonishment at humanity's capacity for evil, depravity, for greed, for apathy. It was too much for me. I wanted to be amazed by something greater.”
― Jonathan Miles

“Everything is salvageable, he told himself, as he sank beneath the waves into the cool bruisy darkness and then, turning, began paddling toward their calls. Even you.”
― Jonathan Miles

“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, Want Not