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Brian Morton QUOTES

Brian Morton QUOTES

1 " The river was so blue it seemed to be breathing. "

― Brian Morton , Breakable You

2 " Without her glasses Vivian did look a little frightening. She had tight sinewy strappy muscles and a face that was hardened and almost brutal - a face that might have been chiseled by a sculptor who had fallen out of love with the idea of beauty. "

― Brian Morton , Breakable You

3 " What you are is a complicated girl with simple needs. You need your books and time to read, and you need a few friends and you need someone-not to take care of you, but to care for you. If you have all those things, you'll always be alright. "

― Brian Morton , Breakable You

4 " The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories. Nothing has meaning in itself: all the objects in the world would be shards of bare mute blankness, spinning wildly out of orbit, if we didn't bind them together with stories. "

― Brian Morton

5 " You seize your freedom in a spirit of rebelliousness, exuberance, defiant joy. But to live that choice -- over the weeks and months and years to come -- requires different qualities. It requires that you turn hard, turn rigid. Because it isn't a choice that the world encourages, you have to wear a suit of armor to defend it. "

― Brian Morton

6 " Every choice we make is either a grwoth choice or a fear choice. "

― Brian Morton , Breakable You

7 " We wish for a symmetry of feeling, but we rarely get it. It is painful to be the one who loves more, and painful to be the one who loves less. "

― Brian Morton , Breakable You

8 " ...it isn't a bad thing to remember that you have some wildness in you, that not every inch of your soul is honorable and responsible and presentable and tamped and tamed. "

― Brian Morton , Breakable You

9 " She loved to return to the world of the book, a workd in which people were willing to let go of everything in order to follow their passions. "

― Brian Morton

10 " The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories. "

― Brian Morton , Starting Out in the Evening

11 " Even in your smallest gestures, you express your sense of honor, if you have one. "

― Brian Morton

12 " ...an artist doesn't really need a great deal of experience. One heartbreak can produce many novels. But you have to have a heart that can break. "

― Brian Morton , Starting Out in the Evening

13 " What matters, finally, isn't finding the kind of person you think you should
love. What matters is finding someone you feel more alive with. "

― Brian Morton , Starting Out in the Evening

14 " ...a piece of writing is only worth doing if you're a different person at the end of the process than you were at the beginning. "

― Brian Morton , Breakable You

15 " To sit across the table and talk with someone you love is itself a complex engagement, with an exhaustingly subtle flow of information; to go to bed with someone--to carry your conversation into the realm of the body, a realm of insecurity and fear as well as pleasure--was always fraught with the sad evidence of how difficult it is to understand another person and make yourself understood. "

― Brian Morton , Starting Out in the Evening

16 " The parasite of art, the virus of art, never ceases to gnaw awat at your brain, never ceases to torture you with the knowledge that whatever you’re doing could be done more beautifully, more powerfully, more stirringly, more disturbingly, more deeply. "

― Brian Morton , A Window Across the River

17 " Knowledge is always a good thing, even when it makes us unhappy "

― Brian Morton , Breakable You

18 " I know it sounds strange but it’s true. I mean that you’re open to life. You’re open to being surprised. You’re open to being changed by life. Most of us lose that quality in our twenties. I don’t know how you’ve managed to hang on to it, but you have.” The music was loud, and the people were loud. "

― Brian Morton , Florence Gordon

19 " Maybe a man can change. It helps when you've been injured, when you've been dislodged from the complacent routines of your life. Sometimes it takes an injury to make you see what you share with others. "

― Brian Morton , Breakable You

20 " Let’s listen again to Dencombe: 'Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.' I love the fact that he uses the word 'passion' and the word 'task' in the same sentence—the one so exalted, the other so commonplace. More than this, I love that he equates them. Our passion is our task. To follow the calling of art, to keep faith with it, to continue with your daily labors despite the frustrations, the distractions, and the other varieties of madness that will inevitably beset you—all this requires passion, but it also requires something else, something more down-to-earth. Call it steeliness. Call it persistence. Call it tenacity. Call it resilience. Call it devotion.
Whatever you decide to call it, the ability to consecrate yourself to the daily task of art isn’t rooted in madness. As James knew, as Dencombe knew, it’s rooted in sanity. "

― Brian Morton