Garth Greenwell > Quotes

“Love isn’t just a matter of looking at someone, I think now, but also of looking with them, of facing what they face.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“He had always been alone, I thought, gazing at a world in which he had never found a place and that was now almost perfectly indifferent to him; he was incapable even of disturbing it, of making a sound it could be bothered to hear.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“I fell back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn't welcomed, even if that welcome is contrived.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“That's the worst thing about teaching, that our actions either have no force at all or have force beyond all intention, and not only our actions but our failures to act, gestures and words held back or unspoken, all we might have done and failed to do; and, more than this, that the consequences echo across years and silence, we can never really know what we've done.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“As we joined the line of people getting off at the last stop before Sofia, I looked once more at the little boy, whom I felt I would never forget, though maybe it wasn't exactly him I would remember, I thought, but the use I would make of him. I had my notes, I knew I would write a poem about him, and then it would be the poem I remembered, which would be both true and false at once, the image I made replacing the real image. Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn't what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn't really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“But then there’s something theatrical in all our embraces, I think, as we weigh our responses against those we perceive or project; always we desire too much or not enough, and compensate accordingly.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“That's all care is, I thought, it's just looking at a thing long enough, why should it be a question of scale? This seemed like a hopeful thought at first, but then it's hard to look at things, or to look at them truly, and we can't look at many at once, and it's so easy to look away.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“You can call out for anything you desire, however aberrant or unlikely, and nearly always there comes an answer, it's a large world, we're never as solitary as we think, as unique or unprecedented, what we feel has always already been felt, again and again, without beginning or end.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“What would it mean to do enough, I wondered, as I had wondered before about that obligation to others that sometimes seems so clear and sometimes disappears altogether, so that now we owe nothing, anything we give is too much, and now our debt is beyond all counting.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“As I walked along that path,

I felt drawn from myself, elated,

struck stupidly good for a moment

by the extravagant beauty of the world.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“You can't speak to him, he said, if you speak to him, if you give any sign to him at all, he will come back; he has to stop existing for you.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“Sometimes we talked the whole night long, as one does only in adolescence or very early in love. I was happy, but also I felt an anxiety that gnawed at me and for which I could find no cause, that gnawed at me more deeply precisely because I could find no cause.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“Even annoyance was part of the pleasure we took in each other, we were that early in love.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“I wanted to root into him, even as the wind said all rootedness was a sham, there were only passing arrangements, makeshift shelters and poor harbors, I love you, I thought suddenly in that rush that makes so much seem possible, I love you, anything I am you have use for is yours.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“words in a foreign language never wound us like words in the language to which we’re born. But”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“Писането на стихотворения беше начин да обичаш нещата, така знаех открай време, да ги съхраняваш, да ги преживяваш повторно; и дори повече от това – беше начин да живееш по-пълноценно, да насищаш опита с по-богат смисъл (...) почудих се дали всъщност не обръщах гръб на нещата, когато ги превръщах в стихотворения, дали вместо да съхранявам света, не бягах от него.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“Read it again, read it more slowly, that was the whole of my pedagogy when I taught my students, who were pressured everywhere else to be more efficient, to take in information more quickly, to make each moment count, to instrumentalize time, which is a terrible way to live, dehumanizing, it disfigures existence.”
― Garth Greenwell, Small Rain

“K. hung his arm around my neck. It was a casual gesture but one I wasn’t used to, and I was almost frightened by the happiness that overtook me, that filled me up and charged me and at the same time carried a thread; it was too unrestrained, there was nothing to keep it in check. I felt solid again as I walked with him, more certain of myself than I had been for years, with his arm around my neck and my own slung at his waist We knocked against each other but what did it matter, there was no one to see us, we moved with an awkward freedom but a freedom nonetheless.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“I had been sick before, of course, but this felt more than sickness, like a physical confirmation of shame.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“Like everything else in my past he was part of the story that had led us to each other; it’s a way of being in love, I think, to see the past like that.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“He would be all right, I thought again, comforting myself by thinking it, though I thought too that he wasn’t altogether mistaken in what he had said, that there would be loss in loving another, that the perspective that limited his grief would also limit his love, which, having taken the measure of its bounds, he could never again imagine as boundless. And I had thought this before, too, how much we lose in gaining this truer version of ourselves, the vision I had urged upon my student, the vision it was my obligation to urge, though it carried us away from our dreams of ourselves, from the grandeur of novels and poems which it was also my obligation to impart. How much smaller I have become, I said to myself, through an erosion necessary to survival perhaps and perhaps still to be regretted, I’ve worn myself down to a bearable size.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“I passed people shopping or walking their dogs, and young people, university students maybe, busy about their lives, so that the streets I walked seemed vibrant to me, more vibrant than my own. But then almost everywhere I went I imagined a place more accommodating of the life I wanted, as if happiness were a matter of streets or parks, as maybe to a point it is; and with R. away for so long I was accustomed to thinking of my real life existing in some distant place or future time, projecting forward in a way that I was afraid might keep me from living fully where I was.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“It was a habit of mine, to rush toward an ending once I thought I could see it, as if the fact of loss were easier to bear than the chance of it.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn’t what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn’t really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“Anything I am you have use for is yours.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“I wanted to ruin what he had made, what he had made me, I mean, the person he had made me.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“I realized that my pleasure wasn't lessened by his absence, that what was surely a betrayal (we had our contract, though it had never been signed, never set in words at all) had only refined our encounter, allowing him to become more vividly present to me even as I was left alone on my stained knees, and allowing me, with all the freedom of fantasy, to make of him what I would.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“If there is a gay ghetto, then that’s where James Baldwin is, and Thomas Mann is, and Virginia Woolf is, and that’s the only place I would ever want to be. And that’s not on the margins of the literary tradition: That’s right at the heart of it.”
― Garth Greenwell

“Whatever the weather I went out and wandered, and now I wandered with K.; I introduced him to my solitude and he deepened it without disturbance.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You