quotes by Robert Goolrick

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"She was the beautiful, lethal, insinuating spider he had waited for all his life.""
— Robert Goolrick

"I think kissing is what seperates us from the animals and makes us divine. "
— Robert Goolrick

"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 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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"'"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)

"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)