Brian Morton > Quotes

“What you are is a complicated girl with simple needs. You need your books and time to read, and you need a few friends and you need someone-not to take care of you, but to care for you. If you have all those things, you'll always be alright.”
― Brian Morton, Breakable You

“The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories. Nothing has meaning in itself: all the objects in the world would be shards of bare mute blankness, spinning wildly out of orbit, if we didn't bind them together with stories.”
― Brian Morton

“You seize your freedom in a spirit of rebelliousness, exuberance, defiant joy. But to live that choice -- over the weeks and months and years to come -- requires different qualities. It requires that you turn hard, turn rigid. Because it isn't a choice that the world encourages, you have to wear a suit of armor to defend it.”
― Brian Morton

“The river was so blue it seemed to be breathing.”
― Brian Morton, Breakable You

“We wish for a symmetry of feeling, but we rarely get it. It is painful to be the one who loves more, and painful to be the one who loves less.”
― Brian Morton, Breakable You

“Every choice we make is either a grwoth choice or a fear choice.”
― Brian Morton, Breakable You

“...it isn't a bad thing to remember that you have some wildness in you, that not every inch of your soul is honorable and responsible and presentable and tamped and tamed.”
― Brian Morton, Breakable You

“She loved to return to the world of the book, a workd in which people were willing to let go of everything in order to follow their passions.”
― Brian Morton

“...an artist doesn't really need a great deal of experience. One heartbreak can produce many novels. But you have to have a heart that can break.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“What matters, finally, isn't finding the kind of person you think you should
love. What matters is finding someone you feel more alive with.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“Even in your smallest gestures, you express your sense of honor, if you have one.”
― Brian Morton

“...a piece of writing is only worth doing if you're a different person at the end of the process than you were at the beginning.”
― Brian Morton, Breakable You

“The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“Knowledge is always a good thing, even when it makes us unhappy”
― Brian Morton, Breakable You

“Without her glasses Vivian did look a little frightening. She had tight sinewy strappy muscles and a face that was hardened and almost brutal - a face that might have been chiseled by a sculptor who had fallen out of love with the idea of beauty.”
― Brian Morton, Breakable You

“The parasite of art, the virus of art, never ceases to gnaw awat at your brain, never ceases to torture you with the knowledge that whatever you’re doing could be done more beautifully, more powerfully, more stirringly, more disturbingly, more deeply.”
― Brian Morton, A Window Across The River: A Powerful Literary Novel of Love Between Artists and the Betrayal That Tears Them Apart

“I know it sounds strange but it’s true. I mean that you’re open to life. You’re open to being surprised. You’re open to being changed by life. Most of us lose that quality in our twenties. I don’t know how you’ve managed to hang on to it, but you have.” The music was loud, and the people were loud.”
― Brian Morton, Florence Gordon

“...life brings you everything at once. You can be in misery because of the misery of your daughter at the same time as you're exhilarated by a new romance, a romance that feels like the first act of a
new life.”
― Brian Morton, Breakable You

“The thing is to let life assault you, make yourself as defenseless as you can. If it bruises you, don't protest. Love your fate.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“Maybe a man can change. It helps when you've been injured, when you've been dislodged from the complacent routines of your life. Sometimes it takes an injury to make you see what you share with others.”
― Brian Morton, Breakable You

“Let’s listen again to Dencombe: 'Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.' I love the fact that he uses the word 'passion' and the word 'task' in the same sentence—the one so exalted, the other so commonplace. More than this, I love that he equates them. Our passion is our task. To follow the calling of art, to keep faith with it, to continue with your daily labors despite the frustrations, the distractions, and the other varieties of madness that will inevitably beset you—all this requires passion, but it also requires something else, something more down-to-earth. Call it steeliness. Call it persistence. Call it tenacity. Call it resilience. Call it devotion.
Whatever you decide to call it, the ability to consecrate yourself to the daily task of art isn’t rooted in madness. As James knew, as Dencombe knew, it’s rooted in sanity.”
― Brian Morton

“You understood me; you helped me understand myself. If reading a book is a naked encounter between two people, I have known you nakedly for years.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“A trip to the market in the morning to buy bread, an afternoon spent reading in a cafe—nothing was routine; a strange place helped you find the poetry in everyday life.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“To sit across the table and talk with someone you love is itself a complex engagement, with an exhaustingly subtle flow of information; to go to bed with someone--to carry your conversation into the realm of the body, a realm of insecurity and fear as well as pleasure--was always fraught with the sad evidence of how difficult it is to understand another person and make yourself understood.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“The moments of beauty, the moments when you feel blessed, are only moments; but memory and imagination, treasuring them, can string them together... Everything else passes away; that which you love remains.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“People, Florence thought as she put on her shoes. What do I need them for again?”
― Brian Morton, Florence Gordon

“A man can't understand how a woman feels--how she can offer up her entire life to him. The man thinks she's bringing him a burden. He doesn't understand that she's trying to give him a gift.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“His kisses were too rote; they were assembly-line kisses. She wanted complex kisses; she wanted each kiss to be a conversation.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“There are certain situations in which you can't convey what you mean. Words don't always work.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“Coincidence. But the eagerness to find meaning in such coincidences is love.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening