Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing. Sarah Manguso More Quotes by Sarah Manguso More Quotes From Sarah Manguso Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self. Sarah Manguso dimensions self writing Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do. Sarah Manguso infinite body moving The only thing I've consistently been interested in in the last twenty-five years is writing very short texts. That continues to interest me as a project, to contain some part of reality, which is chaotic by definition, in a contained space. I like small apartments. I like getting rid of stuff. I went through my files yesterday and spent hours shredding things. It was great. Sarah Manguso hours writing reality You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing. You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness into brightness. Sarah Manguso brightness guessing moving Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us - by taking everything Sarah Manguso This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize. Sarah Manguso important suffering attention The more you talk about something, the less accurate it gets. Sarah Manguso Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little. Sarah Manguso sea littles moving The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear. Sarah Manguso records degrees people My existence shrank from an arrow of light pointing into the future forever to a speck of light that was the present moment. I got better at living in that point of light, making the world into that point. I paid close attention to it. I loved it very much. Sarah Manguso arrows light forever I see no reason not to write whatever comes to me. Sarah Manguso reason writing If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it. Sarah Manguso happened ifs thinking The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know. Sarah Manguso time-passing privilege running I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both. Sarah Manguso mastery empathy people If I'm not writing a thing, depression might be looming. Sarah Manguso writing Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it. Sarah Manguso wake-up defense diaries Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity. Sarah Manguso dancing littles looks I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose. Sarah Manguso writing trying book
