Charles Baxter Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Charles Baxter quote about:
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“Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“As my mother once said to me, ‘They’re quite crazy, dear – men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“When you break the heart of the philosopher, you must apply great force and cunning strategy, but when the deed is completed, the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all. It will not be repaired.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you ...”
-- Charles Baxter -
“Because it is the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it's more of a dull shine, like frequently used silverware.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“When blame has been assigned, the story is over.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“Literature is not an instruction manual.”
-- Charles Baxter -
“What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you--if you happen to be me--with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you.”
-- Charles Baxter