Home > Author > Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell QUOTES

Garth Greenwell QUOTES

1 " Poetry never makes any money, and so there's no pressure to appeal to an audience. That makes a lot of things about being a poet difficult, but it also means freedom to write whatever you want to write, however you want to write it. "

― Garth Greenwell

2 " History is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way. "

― Garth Greenwell

3 " [L]ike poems, cruising carves privacy out of public spaces. Poems are a kind of private communication that occurs in public speech. And I think cruising is that too: a training in reading occult codes; a way of seeing a significance in the world that most people don’t see. "

― Garth Greenwell

4 " the whole point of literature, I think, is that it’s the best technology we have for communicating what another person’s life feels like from the inside. "

― Garth Greenwell

5 " You can't speak to him, he said, if you speak to him, if you give any sign to him at all, he will come back; he has to stop existing for you. "

― Garth Greenwell , What Belongs to You

6 " K. hung his arm around my neck. It was a casual gesture but one I wasn’t used to, and I was almost frightened by the happiness that overtook me, that filled me up and charged me and at the same time carried a thread; it was too unrestrained, there was nothing to keep it in check. I felt solid again as I walked with him, more certain of myself than I had been for years, with his arm around my neck and my own slung at his waist We knocked against each other but what did it matter, there was no one to see us, we moved with an awkward freedom but a freedom nonetheless. "

― Garth Greenwell , What Belongs to You

7 " I wanted to root into him, even as the wind said all rootedness was a sham, there were only passing arrangements, makeshift shelters and poor harbors, I love you, I thought suddenly in that rush that makes so much seem possible, I love you, anything I am you have use for is yours. "

― Garth Greenwell , Cleanness

8 " I had never wanted permanence before, not really, or I had wanted my freedom more; I had accepted that passionate feeling faded, all my earlier experience had confirmed it, when love that seemed certain simply dissolved, on one side or both, for no particular reason, leaving little trace. "

― Garth Greenwell , Cleanness

9 " Love isn’t just a matter of looking at someone, I think now, but also of looking with them, of facing what they face. "

― Garth Greenwell , What Belongs to You

10 " I fell back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn't welcomed, even if that welcome is contrived. "

― Garth Greenwell , What Belongs to You

11 " He had always been alone, I thought, gazing at a world in which he had never found a place and that was now almost perfectly indifferent to him; he was incapable even of disturbing it, of making a sound it could be bothered to hear. "

― Garth Greenwell , What Belongs to You

12 " That's the worst thing about teaching, that our actions either have no force at all or have force beyond all intention, and not only our actions but our failures to act, gestures and words held back or unspoken, all we might have done and failed to do; and, more than this, that the consequences echo across years and silence, we can never really know what we've done. "

― Garth Greenwell , Cleanness

13 " As we joined the line of people getting off at the last stop before Sofia, I looked once more at the little boy, whom I felt I would never forget, though maybe it wasn't exactly him I would remember, I thought, but the use I would make of him. I had my notes, I knew I would write a poem about him, and then it would be the poem I remembered, which would be both true and false at once, the image I made replacing the real image. Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn't what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn't really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it. "

― Garth Greenwell , What Belongs to You

14 " Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But "

― Garth Greenwell , What Belongs to You

15 " That's all care is, I thought, it's just looking at a thing long enough, why should it be a question of scale? This seemed like a hopeful thought at first, but then it's hard to look at things, or to look at them truly, and we can't look at many at once, and it's so easy to look away. "

― Garth Greenwell , What Belongs to You

16 " What would it mean to do enough, I wondered, as I had wondered before about that obligation to others that sometimes seems so clear and sometimes disappears altogether, so that now we owe nothing, anything we give is too much, and now our debt is beyond all counting. "

― Garth Greenwell , What Belongs to You

17 " But then there’s something theatrical in all our embraces, I think, as we weigh our responses against those we perceive or project; always we desire too much or not enough, and compensate accordingly. "

― Garth Greenwell , What Belongs to You

18 " As I walked along that path,

I felt drawn from myself, elated,

struck stupidly good for a moment

by the extravagant beauty of the world. "

― Garth Greenwell , What Belongs to You

19 " Sometimes we talked the whole night long, as one does only in adolescence or very early in love. I was happy, but also I felt an anxiety that gnawed at me and for which I could find no cause, that gnawed at me more deeply precisely because I could find no cause. "

― Garth Greenwell , What Belongs to You

20 " You can call out for anything you desire, however aberrant or unlikely, and nearly always there comes an answer, it's a large world, we're never as solitary as we think, as unique or unprecedented, what we feel has always already been felt, again and again, without beginning or end. "

― Garth Greenwell , Cleanness