Robert Goolrick > Quotes

“There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven't had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Their love for me was both a myth and a torture and so I wrecked everything. I hurt them, and I left them hurting.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I would give anything, anything, to be the man to whom this has not happened. I can not accommodate myself to it. In a lifetime of trying, I can not accommodate myself to it.

And now I will have to be that person forever.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book.”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“There is a loveliness to life that does not fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency toward grace that does not fail us. ”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I wasn't safe. I wasn't permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn't there. There was nobody home.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I know that I am not the only person who is alone in the world. I know that others sorrow in the night. That others pick up a razor and slice into their own skin, with greater or lesser success. I know that others look at their lives and see only silent failure and disconsolation, feeding the cat, checking their email, doing the crossword. I know that I am not the only person to have lived a life like mine. I am aware. (212)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“How most people carry on is a mystery. What they talk about at supper. How they can stand to sit in front of a TV from eight until Leno every night. How they can think bowling is fun. How they choose their neckties. How they bear the weight of everyday life without screaming. How a person can go through a whole life and never once contemplate suicide, like people who have never once wanted to be a movie star. How one young man can be handsome and strong and marry and heiress and work at Debevoise and Plimpton and retire to Nantucket to await the visits of his grandchildren, how they can be sailing in the bay while another young man, exactly like the first, can end up in a glass room in Lexington, Kentucky, on Haldol and Thorazine, without hope, without a girlfriend, without a future, and how easily the one can become the other. How one woman can take Gatorade to every one of her son's lacrosse games and another can lie in bed all day weeping, popping generic drugs, watching Oprah as though waiting for the Second Coming, and piling her dirty dishes in the laundry room. How life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep. It's a mystery and there is no answer. (95)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I tell these stories because I have lied about my life to people who have been kind to me and I am tired of lying. I tell it because I don't want people to think that I have fucked up my life over and over just because I was in a bad mood.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“... It was a story of people who don't choose life over death until it's too late to know the difference, people whose goodness is forgotten, left behind like a child's toy in a dusty playroom, people who see many things and remember only a handful of the them and learn from even fewer, people who hurt themselves, who wreck their own lives and then go on to wreck the lives of those around them, who cannot be helped or assuaged by love or kindness or luck or charm, who forget kindness, the feeling and practice of it, and how it can save even the worst, most misshapen life from despair. It was just a story about despair.”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“If love drove people mad, what would lack of love do?”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“Catherine Land liked the beginnings of things. The pure white possibility of the empty room, the first kiss, the first swipe at larceny. And endings, she liked endings, too. The drama of the smashing glass, the dead bird, the tearful goodbye, the last awful word which could never be unsaid or unremembered.
It was the middles that gave her pause. This, for all its forward momentum, this was a middle. The beginnings were sweet, the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than that.”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“She believed in the miraculous. Or she had, until she reached an age when, all of a sudden, she realized that the life she was living, was in fact, her life. The clay of her being, so long infinitely malleable, had been formed, hardened into what now seemed a palpable, unchanging object. A shell she inhabited. It shocked her then. It shocked her now, like a slap in the face. ”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“Sometime, Mrs. Truitt, we work very hard at something, we exhaust ourselves to accomplish something which seems vital to us." He chose his words with care. "Our best hope for happiness. And sometimes we find that thing, only to find it has simply not been worth the effort.”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“Somewhere in the pain there is pleasure, and that is the most awful part, perhaps. (170)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I think kissing is what separates us from the animals and makes us divine.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Even if we choose to sever the ties to all we ever knew as home, to redefine the spaces we live in, the emotions that seem most natural to us, the ways we have of loving, there is a haunting feeling of loss and admiration for the people we knew first and best. Even if we never speak to them again, they are our first and purest loves. There is, for all of us, a time in which they meant the world. Sometimes, that time lasts as long as we live. It is eternal as breath. It is changeless and deathless. Sometimes, it ends at a very early age. Sometimes, we cannot help ourselves. Things happen. (203)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Standing in the center of the crowd, his solitude was enormous. He felt that in all the vast and frozen space in which he lived his life - every hand needy, every heart wanting something from him - everybody had a reason to be and a place to land. Everybody but him. For him there was nothing. In all the cold and bitter world, there was not a single place for him to sit down.”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“I heard this old country guy say once, "I think you decide pretty early on how happy you're going to be, and then you just go on and be it." But I don't think that's the case for a lot of people. For a lot of people, for a lot of the people I met in the bin, I think personal choice has very little to do with it. (94)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“There was so much we had done to ourselves, so much we said in our sessions that our hearts were rent with sorrow. There is so much that happens to the human heart that is in the realm of the unthinkable, the unknowable, the unbearable. (95)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I think kissing is what seperates us from the animals and makes us divine. ”
― Robert Goolrick

“Her true heart, however, was buried so far inside her, so gone beneath the vast blanket of her lies and deceptions and whims. Like her jewels now beneath the snow, it lay hidden until some thaw might some to it. She had no way of knowing, of course, whether this heart she imagined herself to have was, in fact, real in any way. Perhaps it was like the soldier's severed arm that keeps throbbing for years, or like a broken bone that aches at the approach of a storm. Perhaps the heart she imagined was one she had never really had at all. But how did they do it, those women she saw on the street, laughing with their charming or their ill-tempered children in restaurants, in train stations, everywhere around her? Any why was she left out of the whole sentimental panorama she felt eddying around her every day of her life?”
― Robert Goolrick

“...she had brought harm to him, in the believe that nothing mattered, that no moment had consequences beyond the moment itself. She had agreed to kill him without realizing that he would die".”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“She was the beautiful, lethal, insinuating spider he had waited for all his life.”
― Robert Goolrick

“Sometimes she sat and let her mind go blank and her eyes go out of focus, so that she watched the slow, jerky movements of the motes that floated across her pupils. They amazed her as a child. Now she saw them as a reflection of how she moved, floating listlessly through the world, occasionally bumping into another body without acknowledgment, and then floating on, free and alone.”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“What makes a child of four realize that something awful is going to happen? (168)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“In times of grief, you're waiting for something to happen, but the thing you're waiting for has already taken place.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“How life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“In a life, in any life, bad things happen. Many good things happen, of course, we know what they are-joy, tenderness, success beauty-but some bad things happen as well. Sometimes, very bad things happen. Children sicken and die. People we love don't love us, can never love us.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“We want to do something with the time we have, something that will give that time a certain meaning, a certain weight.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“We tend to go on loving the things the people who loved us loved. They are invested with soul, even if the people are long dead, even if they do not turn out to be who you thought they were.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Soul murder, the psychiatrists call it, the sexual violation of children. Unimaginably small boys. Boys whose heads do not reach to their father's waists. Girls who are no more than infants. Boys and girls whose lives are ineradicably violated. Whose trust and innocence are lost to them forever. (208)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“...desire had its exaggerated and dramatic pleasures, but he was bored by the endless scenes and recantations. Love was simply the same steady heartbeat hour after hour. It bored him with its lack of event.”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“Then there was survival. There was going on, as she had always gone on, without much joy, against her will, against her instincts, without the stomach for it, but on and on and on, without relief, without release, without a hand to reach out and touch her heart. Without kindness or comfort. But on.
Forced into such poverty, imprisoned in such despair, there was only one thing she was sure she could do. She could survive.”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“Every exchange making him feel like an idiot, making him draw his spine up straight and making him fiddle with his hair, and all he wanted to do was to see her naked on the floor. Not brutal, not unkind, enraptured.”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“She was the beautiful, lethal,insinuating spider he had waited for all his life. She was the final knife in his heart. He opened his heart with gladness.”
― Robert Goolrick

“As you have been on the road, what have you been hearing from readers about A RELIABLE WIFE?

RG: The most interesting question came from a young man in his 30s who asked me to discuss the relationship between love and aging. We think when we’re young that, as we get older, our passions and enthusiasms will fade, will lose their hold on us, and we will enter into some more gentle phase. I don’t find it to be true. Our passions, in fact, intensify, like a sauce that has been reduced to its essence by long slow simmering over a low flame.”
― Robert Goolrick

“But I don't think that's the case for a lot of people. For a lot of people, for a lot the people I met in the bin, I think personal choice has very little to do with it.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I loved kissing them on the mouth, the taste of their tongues. I think kissing is what separated us from the animals and makes us divine.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Just as there was a day every spring when the women of the town, as though by some secret signal, appeared in their summer dresses before the first heat was felt, there was as well a day when winter showed the knife before the first laceration.”
― Robert Goolrick

“She had been adept at the beginning and the end of things, and now she saw that whatever pleasures life had to offer lay in the middle. She could find some peace there.”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“But I told my grandmother, and she listened, and then she said, "Don't ever tell this story to anybody else. If you tell this story to anybody else, something terrible will happen. Something terrible will happen to our family." And then she had a lot to do. (174)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life