A Quote by Andrew Sean Greer

Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory.
Sometimes it still seems unreal just to board a plane and fly to America, because that's something that I'd always dreamed of, but I was completely sure would never happen, and sometimes, when I think about that, it still feels a bit unreal.
The world needs champions. Too many people still find the path to opportunity closed to them. Too many still find unnecessary obstacles to education, to housing, to the full and free exercise of the right to vote.
Some writers, I'm told, look for their characters' surnames in telephone directories. I don't - it seems too obvious. Or too deliberate: if you go looking for names, you're bound to find them, of course, but I've always had a superstitious hunch that the names you find by accident are always going to be better and more satisfying somehow.
When was the last time you wanted to say it all to the right person To have it all come out right, to surprise yourself at how together you could be. When was the last time you ever met someone who made you want to give it all to them I mean give yourself to them. Where you couldn't express yourself enough - like you wanted to cut off one of your arms to be understood. That's it - you would cut your head off to have someone understand you. You know how pointless that one is. You know how many times you've smashed yourself to bits on the rocks.
You probably need 1/10 of the world's population for us to continue to exist. There's just too many damn people. You have to somehow get us from 7 billion people to... I don't know what the magic number is, but I imagine at some point, that will happen. And I don't know about you, but I don't think I'm making the cut.
You have to think before speaking. That's a quality I'm continuously evolving. For some reason, it seems like I'm bumping my head into the wall a little bit too many times.
I have to resist the temptation to want to learn everything. You know, you can't. You have to restrict yourself at some time, or else you find yourself just being spread too thin. And already I think I try too many things.
But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.
People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually, it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like you're watching television -- you don't feel anything.
I think the hardest person to love is yourself I mean- You carry your flaws like burdens And you feel them on your skin The words you shouldn't have said Still echo in your head So you keep quiet Your mistakes, like monsters They haunt you And you put them to sleep every night The words you should've said Still echo in your head I bet you'd give yourself a chance If you were someone else instead
Of course, it’s true that sometimes the pink at sunrise somehow seems brighter than the pink at sunset, and that when you’re feeling down the the landscape seems darker too - you see things through the filter of your own sensibility. But the things themselves, out there, they don’t change. They existed, and that’s all there is to it.
In TV and movies, you kill yourself spending all this time to think up the symbolism or what if that deer that runs across your hero's path somehow conveys what's going on inside your hero's head? When a lot of times, you just want to hear what he's thinking.
I've played a mother many times, even in tragic things like, "I Dreamed of Africa," so I know how it is to lose a child cinematically. I have so much compassion on so many fronts, for women who have lost children or tried for years and couldn't have them.
One thing: you have to walk, and create the way by your walking; you will not find a ready-made path. It is not so cheap, to reach to the ultimate realization of truth. You will have to create the path by walking yourself; the path is not ready-made, lying there and waiting for you. It is just like the sky: the birds fly, but they don't leave any footprints. You cannot follow them; there are no footprints left behind.
When you go into the world today, before you leave your home, promise yourself that you'll find at least one miracle. Without any limits or bounds on what you think it should look like, simply state for yourself your clear intention that of the many miracles that cross your path, you'll recognize one of them.
I find that, for me, it is this concept of borrowed or built life, life on loan, that gets me writing. It's similar to speaking about literature. I like it, and then I don't like it. It has such an inherent vein of pretention, because you're not speaking about real things. There's a literary pretentiousness made of speaking and spending so much time on unreal persons. And it seems, now, impossible to create an unpretentious, totally organic character.
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