Adam Haslett QUOTES

21 " The monster you lie with is your own. The struggle is endlessly private. I thought it was over. That one night the beast at my back would squeeze more tightly and I would cease breathing. What remained of me hoped for it. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

22 " I don't know what most people mean when they use the word love. If they haven't contorted their lives around a hope sharp enough to bleed them empty, then I think they're just kidding. A hope undoes what tiny pride you have, and makes you thankful for the undoing, so long as it promises another hour with the person who is now the world. Maybe people mean attractiveness, or affection, or pleasantness, or security. Like the nonbelievers in church who enjoy the hymns or go for the sens of community, but avert their eyes from the cross. I feel sorry for them. They are dead before their time. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

23 " If you think of memory not just as looking back but as being aware of time and how it passes and what the passage of it feels like, then there is something about being in motion that does cause it. Through some sleight of mind, physical forward motion makes time seem visible. Which causes me to think that maybe the unnatural speed of cars and jets actually creates nostalgia. Because the simplest way to block out the strangeness of time passing before your eyes is to fix it in place, to edit it down to monuments or potted plants. Like, "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

24 " There’s something illiberal about the way infants are thrust into the hands of people who have no idea what they’re doing, who can only experiment. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

25 " What I have always found most comforting about these forms is the trace of hope I get as I'm filling them out. How they break your life down into such tidy realms, making each seem tractable, because discrete, in a way they never are beyond the white noise of the waiting room. You get that fleeting sense that you're on the verge of being understood, truly and fully, and for the first time, if you could just get it all down in black and white before the receptionist calls your name. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

26 " It was one of those youthful promises that you make to yourself and keep long after you stop recognizing what you are doing, or how it is distorting your life. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

27 " That’s the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you’re alive - the backward ache. That’s what music is. The trouble - for me - is that at some stage I realized those miracles, those aches, they have a history. They're not private. The music's always about what someone's lost. That's what you hear, when it's good: the worlds people lost, the ones they want back. And once you hear it that way, you can't avoid it - that it's somehow about justice. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

28 " Anywhere people lived memory collected like sediment on the bed of a river, dropping from the flow of time to become fixed in the places time ran over "

― Adam Haslett , Union Atlantic

29 " This street-this whole town-was so familiar that I looked straight through it, as if it were no longer a place unto itself but merely an opening onto the past. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

30 " ...even Michael, who never stopped trying to want what we wanted for him. How could he? We're not individuals. We're haunted by the living as well as the dead. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

31 " The members of Joy Division likely weren’t meditating on Frank Lloyd Wright when they took the stage in Manchester but those flat-fronted black cotton trousers and narrow cut shirts didn’t come from nowhere. Peter Saville, who designed all of Factory’s records, understood in perfectly well: the iconic weight of black and white balanced against the release of splendour, in this case the dark magnificence of the music itself. Which might describe the tension of Protestant affect more generally: all guardedness and restraint until the eruption of an unextirpated beauty wakes us for a moment from the dream of efficiency. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

32 " I gave myself a few days back at home before going in to see my clients again. It was hard at first. And it stayed hard for months. To sit there quietly, hands folded in my lap, listening to them elaborate on their troubles. An old impatience returned, the kind I had experienced when I started as a therapist: the urge to search for the moments in their past that contained the key to liberating them in the present. That's why I used to do, press for more and more family history, excusing it to myself as interest and attention, when really it was a distraction from the suffering in front of me, a desire to find the passage of experience that would explain their pain away. What good plot didn't offer that? A meaning sufficient to account for the events. But as time went on, I realized that my clients' lives weren't works of art. They told themselves stories all the time, but the stories trailed off, got forgetting, and then repeated - distractions themselves, oftentimes, from the feelings they were somewhere taught would damn them or wreck them.

It had taken me a long time to see how strong this desire for an answer was. I had to train myself to notice how it arose, and how to put it aside. Because if all I did was scour what a person said to me each week for clues, I wouldn't do her much good. I had to give up my own need to cure if I was going to stand any chance of shepherding her toward acceptance of who she already was.

I never did that for Michael. I never gave up my belief in a secret, a truth lodged in the past, which if he could only experience and accept would release him. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

33 " This is the thing I have discovered: Michael's being gone doesn't mean we stop trying to save him. The strain is less but it doesn't vanish. It becomes part of our bewilderment, a kind of activity without motive, which provides its own strange continuity. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

34 " It’s easy to make too much of fathers, I want to say. A "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

35 " My mind can rest. Which is when my situation becomes obvious. There is no getting better. There is love I cannot bear, which has kept me from drifting entirely loose. There are the medicines I can take that flood my mind without discrimination, slowing the monster, moving the struggle underwater, where I then must live in the murk. But there is no killing the beast. Since I was a young man, it has hunted me. And it will hunt me until I am dead. The older I become, the closer it gets. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

36 " There is so much drivel about psychoactive meds, so much corruption, bad faith, over- and underprescription, vagueness, profiteering, ignorance, and hope, that it’s easy to forget they sometimes work, alleviating real suffering, at least for a time. This was such a time. I "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

37 " I don't know what most people mean when they use the word love. If they haven't contorted their lives around a hope sharp enough to bleed them empty, then I think they're just kidding. A hope that undoes what tiny pride you have, and makes you thankful for the undoing, so long as it promises another hour with the person who is now the world. Maybe people mean attractiveness, or affection, or pleasantness, or security. Like the nonbelievers in church who enjoy the hymns or go for the sense of community, but avert their eyes from the cross. I feel sorry for them. They are dead before their time. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

38 " But holding Michael had always been like holding a little person, who knew that his feeding would end, who knew that if you were picked up you would be put down, that the comfort came but also went. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

39 " I'm the only one who doesn't always want answers. John may never articulate his questions, but they are with him, a way of being. And the children want answers to everything all the time. What's for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner? Where's Kelsey? Where's Dad? Why do we have to come in? Why do we have to go to bed? Some days the only words I speak to them are answers, and reasons I can't answer, and instructions in place of the answers they want. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone

40 " The light in that room was a kind of malpractice. "

― Adam Haslett , Imagine Me Gone