Top 19 Quotes & Sayings by Sarah Manguso

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Sarah Manguso.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Sarah Manguso

Sarah Manguso is an American writer and poet. In 2007, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), was named an "Editors’ Choice" title by the New York Times Sunday Book Review and a 2008 "Best Nonfiction Book of the Year" by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her book Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (2015) was also named a New York Times "Editors’ Choice." Her debut novel, Very Cold People, was published by Penguin in 2022.

I see no reason not to write whatever comes to me.
Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us - by taking everything
If I'm not writing a thing, depression might be looming. — © Sarah Manguso
If I'm not writing a thing, depression might be looming.
Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little.
If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it.
I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.
Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.
Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity.
The more you talk about something, the less accurate it gets.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing.
This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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