Sara Gran > Quotes

“I never met an addict who came from a nice home . I've met addicts that came from families that had money and nice houses. But never from a nice home.”
― Sara Gran, Dope

“It doesn't matter what people want to hear. It doesn't matter if people like you. It doesn't matter if the whole world thinks you're crazy. It doesn't matter whose heart you break. What matters is the truth.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

“Be grateful for every scar life inflicts on you. Where we’re unhurt is where we are false. Where we are wounded and healed is where our real self gets to show itself. That’s where you get to show who you really are”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

“Because this, for better or worse, is exactly where the truth lies--at the intersection of the forgotten and the ignored, in the neighborhood of all we have tried to forget.”
― Sara Gran

“Never be afraid to learn from the ether...That's where knowledge lives before someone hunts it, kills it, and mounts it in a book.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

“WE COULD devote our lives to making sense of the odd, the inexplicable, the coincidental. But most of us don’t, and I didn’t either.”
― Sara Gran, Come Closer

“Instead I walked towards the man, meeting him halfway. “Just miss a train?” I heard myself ask. He shrugged. I could not believe I was engaging this man in conversation. He was disgusting up close, with mottled, pitted skin and a shaggy grown out haircut. “I hate that,” I said. “Especially at night. Especially at night when you’re waiting for a train and there’s someone there. And you never know. I mean, in the city you just never know who you’re dealing with. They might have a knife, or a gun, or whatever. They might, I don’t know, be the kind of person who hates men who hang out in train stations, waiting for women. She might be the kind of person who takes men like that and rips them limb from fucking limb with her bare hands.” The man left the station without a word, and the train took me home safe and sound.”
― Sara Gran, Come Closer

“What we think is impossible happens all the time.”
― Sara Gran, Come Closer

“People think live is, you know, this spiritual thing, "the lama said. "This 'feeling'. But that's not my thing. In my book, love is physical act. Love is not ethereal. Love is sticking by someone when they're in the nuthouse. Love is when you keep calling someone when they don't call you back. Love is dirty and solid. Love is, you know, earth and shit and blood and hair.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Did I really think it was wonderful? Wonderful was probably an exaggeration. I thought it was fine. Maybe even good. I couldn't say the last time I thought anything was exactly wonderful. That implied more joy than I may ever have felt.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“The detective thinks he is investigating a murder or a missing girl. But truly he is investigating something else altogether, something he cannot grasp hold of directly. Satisfaction will be rare. Uncertainty will be your natural state. Sureness will always elude you. The detective will always circle around what he wants, never seeing it whole. We do not go on despite this. We go on because of it.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

“We all want to be someone else. And sometimes we succeed in convincing ourselves we can be.
But it doesn't last, and our true selves, broken and scarred, always win out in the end.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Most friends had fallen away over the years. Either they'd started avoiding me, as if my grief and bad luck were contagious, or I'd started to avoid them, unwilling to give them the chance to disappoint me. Besides, too much time around normal people made me feel like an alien, unwanted and ugly, fluent in a different language.”
― Sara Gran, The Book of the Most Precious Substance

“Usually people avoided mentioning Abel's name, as if he'd done something unforgiveable. Which I guess he had: He reminded people of the cruel unfairness of life, and the closeness of death.”
― Sara Gran, The Book of the Most Precious Substance

“There are no coincidences, only mysteries that haven't been solved, clues that haven't been placed. Most are blind to the language of the bird overhead, the leaf in our path, the phonographic record stuck in a groove, the unknown caller on the phone. They don't see the omens. They don't know the signs.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

“There's nothing that isn't worth writing about. If you look closely at your life you'll find plenty to write about there, too.”
― Sara Gran

“Like with so many people, even doctors (maybe especially doctors), there was the constant implication that I'd done something wrong, as if the situation Abel and I were in was the result of bad decisions we'd made, a chain of selfish and foolish mistakes that had dropped us here. If this had happened to them, well, surely they would have found a way out. They'd find a cure, have better insurance, have a real family, and, most of all, never be so stupid as to get sick to begin with. Or marry a sick person.”
― Sara Gran, The Book of the Most Precious Substance

“Happiness is the temporary result of denying the knowledge one already has.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Omens change. Signs shift. Nothing is permanent.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

“Those who try to grasp on to the mystery will never succeed. Only those who let it slip their fingers will come to know it, and hear its secrets”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

“I don't believe in answers. I don't believe in big sweeping philosophies. All the great men of history tried to make these absolute laws, answer all the big questions, and they were always wrong. There's no big answers out there, not that we can understand. I think the thing is just to somehow accept that life doesn't always make sense. Terrible things can happen. It's ridiculous to try to spin it. I mean, maybe in the grand sense, you know, when we all come out to take our bows at the end, it'll all seem logical and wonderful. But in the meantime, life can fucking hurt. We need to be there for each other. That's the real magical act--making someone a sandwich, cleaning the flat.”
― Sara Gran, The Book of the Most Precious Substance

“I think it’s your civic obligation to be utterly fucking furious about politics.”
― Sara Gran, The Infinite Blacktop

“And that’s all I’ve ever wanted, really: someone to love me, and never leave me alone.”
― Sara Gran, Come Closer

“I was glad I wasn’t pretty anymore. It was so much easier to do things like this without being pretty.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

“People thought money would make them happy. But money was the consolation prize in life. Money was what you had left to dream for when all the other dreams died. Money was what would keep you going when nothing else could delight you again.”
― Sara Gran, The Book of the Most Precious Substance

“I wasn't only sad--I was angry. I still felt lost in a dark, terrifying maze. And I was furious at the world for leaving me here.”
― Sara Gran, The Book of the Most Precious Substance

“You cannot follow another's footsteps to the truth," Silette wrote. "A hand can point the way. But the hand is not the teaching. The finger that points the way is not the way. The mystery is a payless land, and each detective must cut her own trail through a cruel territory.
"Believe nothing. Question everything. Follow only the clues.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

“Mysteries never end," Silette wrote. "And we solve them anyway, knowing we are both solving both everything and nothing. We solve them knowing the world will surely be as poorly or even worse off than before. But this is the piece of life we have been given authority over, nothing else; and while we may ask why over and over, no one yet has been given an answer.”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

“Possession by K. L. Walker,”
― Sara Gran, Come Closer: A Novel

“He leaned over and kissed me — not for the first time, but it still felt like something. Like something I don't remember having felt before, or at least for a long time. Like a door had been opened that had been shut so long ago that I forgot it was there, and whatever was behind that door was younger and brighter and less burdened than what I'd becom”
― Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway