Alexander Maksik > Quotes

“Cowards spend their lives alone. Either with people who can't hurt them, or with no one at all.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“The thing is you have to fight the whole time. You can't stop. Otherwise you just end up somewhere, bobbing in the middle of a life you never wanted.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“Anyone you can fool isn't worth loving.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“Everything can change, but only with abandon.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“I would fight for him and against anyone who wouldn't. It wasn't complicated. In the beginning love never is.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“As I walked home, there was the familiar crush of isolation, that bodily loneliness that swept through me every winter. It was as if I'd been injected with something cold and vicious. I could feel it spreading through me, falling heavy in the center of my chest, pooling there. It was bitter and it was devastating and it frightened me.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“But one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”
― Alexander Maksik

“Silver interrupted him, “Tell me what it’s about without telling me the story. I’m not interested in the plot. I want to know what the play is about.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing: A Novel

“And it was the speed that provided some solace. For if it moved like that, it would always move like that, and somehow, because of it, things change, somehow things end.”
― Alexander Maksik, A Marker to Measure Drift

“Find some people you give a shit about. Who care about you. Who are smarter than you are. Find a woman. Who laughs at you. Who'll kick your ass out of the house. You find that woman and she's the same woman who'll throw herself in front of a truck for you? Well, then you're somewhere.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“I read the way you read when you're young. I believed that everything had been written for me, that what I saw, felt, learned, was discovery all my own. I read for hours without rest.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“People used to tell me when I was young that I didn't know what I was capable of, that my intelligence was limitless, that I could do anything. Which I've come to realize is true in both directions. I never imagined that I was capable of this life. It would have seemed impossible to me when I was younger, but God do we surprise ourselves. They never tell you that what we surprise ourselves with may be disappointment.”
― Alexander Maksik

“Now I sat at the small table in my apartment. There was the hum of the room. The sound of the blade cutting through the chicken. The sound of wine in my throat. Returning the glass to the table. I tried to be perfectly still. I held my breath and imagined myself alone in Paris. In a room in a city holding my breath.”
― Alexander Maksik

“The quiet of a school emptied for the summer is that of a hotel closed for winter, a library closed for the night, ghosts swirling through the rooms.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“Time passes, her mother said, peeling carrots. No matter what you do. No matter what happens, she said, crushing garlic, hammering the side of her favorite knife with her fist. Beauty or horror, my heart. Turning on the stove. Beauty or horror, it passes.”
― Alexander Maksik, A Marker to Measure Drift

“The moon was a fang in the lightning sky.”
― Alexander Maksik

“This marriage. It isn't happiness they feel. Something else. They feel possibility, a faint hope perhaps. But it has nothing to do with love. It has nothing to do with them together.
We're three people in a room.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“It is the most fundamental thing I know about being alive: Everything that lasts is invention followed by tenacious faith.”
― Alexander Maksik, Shelter in Place

“This was the advantage of desire. Desire focused the mind. It eliminated extraneous thought. The greater the desire, the less the burden of the mind. She would like to live her life this way. Perhaps it was how to survive intact. Live to satisfy her desires. Desire only what she could have.”
― Alexander Maksik, A Marker to Measure Drift

“The optimism, the sense of possibility and hope comes at the end of August. There are new pens, unmarked novels, fresh textbooks, and promises of a better year. The season of reflection is not January but June.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“But all the wanting in the world, her mother reminded her, will leave you with exactly what you have.”
― Alexander Maksik

“We the erratic keep terrible time.”
― Alexander Maksik, Shelter in Place: A Novel

“He thanked me, looked at his watch and blew air through his closed lips--a national gesture acknowledging that life is and will always be this way.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“We are smart people sitting in a room talking about beautiful things, ugly and difficult things.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“I wonder-perhaps I don't understand-but is it true that you're not sorry for what you've done? Morally. Are you sorry? I mean, fundamentally. Do you regret what you've done here? Or are you utterly unrepentant? Do you understand that what you've done is wrong?”
― Alexander Maksik