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Frederick Weisel QUOTES

Frederick Weisel QUOTES

1 " The problem with escaping is that we leave behind us, even among those we love, different versions of the truth and everything we couldn’t bring ourselves to say. "

― Frederick Weisel

2 " As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhappiness for having failed to find the one thing she wanted. For the first time she was a character in her own writing, and her frailties and mistakes were trapped on the page by the beauty and unsparing focus of her prose. Towards the end it was a battle to finish a page. The story was the story she had told herself for decades, deep within her own mind, and now as it grew, line by line, on the paper before her, she wrestled with each turn in the path all over again, as if it were still possible to change its course with the power of her words. "

― Frederick Weisel , Teller

3 " People are complicated,” she said. “Didn’t they teach you that in biography school? "

― Frederick Weisel , Teller

4 " What spares us is memory,” he said. “It’s what makes us worth saving. However low we sink, whatever promise we no longer fulfill, we tell our stories. That’s why you’re so important, Charlie. You’re a guardian of our national memory. "

― Frederick Weisel , Teller

5 " Of course, when you fall out of love, it’s rarely about just one failure or one betrayal, is it? . . .
How does it happen? All those things you once loved about each other are replaced by other things that remind you of something you hate until you’re always setting each other off, and what you share is a battleground. In the end, the failure turns out to be less about sex—which surprises most men—and more about loss of respect. One morning your partner looks at you across the bed and wonders at the waywardness of her own heart—how, she asks herself, can she feel such disdain for someone she once felt such love? "

― Frederick Weisel , Teller

6 " In March of that year, I saw a man named Paul Barkley shot to death. It happened late at night in the parking lot of a café in Santa Rosa called Galileo’s. "

― Frederick Weisel

7 " Aren’t autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don’t we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am. "

― Frederick Weisel

8 " Take a seat, Charlie,” he said. “I’ll kill you in a few minutes. It’ll be good for you. "

― Frederick Weisel , Teller

9 " Over the years, Skye sampled every drug she could find, and like many addicts, had a working knowledge of pharmacology. She snorted coke and swallowed pills. She took downers—orange and red Seconal, red and ivory Dalmane, Miltown, Librium, Luminal, Nembutal, and Quaaludes. Blue devils, red birds, purple hearts. Enough of them sank her in a kind of coma, where she watched her own limbs suspended in front of her in syrup. For a party, there was Benzedrine, rushing in her veins and making her talk for an hour in one long sentence. Day to day, she carried yellow tablets loose in her pockets, Dilaudid and Percodan, and chewed them in the back of classrooms. But her favorite was the greatest pain reliever of them all, named for the German word for hero. "

― Frederick Weisel , Teller

10 " At first, he talked about the flowers in the garden behind his country house in Surrey. His voice still had its Midlands accent but was soft now and barely audible. He knew the plants by name and took a few minutes with each of them: ageratum, coreopsis, echinacea, rudbeckia. The yarrow, he said, had rose-red flowers on two-foot stems. Achillea millefolium, the plant Achilles used to heal wounds. "

― Frederick Weisel , Teller

11 " Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing—escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you’ll find a compulsion to flee—a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores.
— Teller: A Novel "

― Frederick Weisel

12 " If they’re together long enough, every couple has one conversation over and over. This was ours. "

― Frederick Weisel , Teller

13 " There’s an old adage: the sensation of drowning reminds you of everything you ever knew about swimming. "

― Frederick Weisel , Teller

14 " Do you know what the essential problem of the piano is?” he asked. He held me so his head was a few inches from my own. His eyes darted back and forth. “It is impossible to play continuously on a piano string like a violin. The problem is to sustain a note. "

― Frederick Weisel , Teller

15 " No single act is entirely redemptive, but all a fallen man has is the first step back. "

― Frederick Weisel

16 " Sometimes, however much you plan, however many precautions you take, something happens, and in a minute the world is changed. After that, you’re the person on the other side of that minute. "

― Frederick Weisel , Teller

17 " The sun had already set behind the mountains, and the sky had been drained of color. The trellises of sauvignon blanc flowed down the hill in even rows toward the valley floor. Whatever I was looking for, it wasn’t outside. As far as I could tell, the grapes were minding their own business. "

― Frederick Weisel , Teller

18 " Sometimes we do terrible things to the ones we love just to see what harm we can cause. "

― Frederick Weisel , Teller

19 " Seth lay on a sofa. His large dirty work boots were defiantly planted on the sofa cushion, all his energy focused on smoking a cigarette, as if it were a job. "

― Frederick Weisel

20 " The thing about hitting bottom is that, in the middle of it, sometimes you don’t know if you’re really hitting bottom or just bouncing off ledges on your way further down. "

― Frederick Weisel , Teller