"When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story."
— Charles Baxter (Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction)

"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 (The Feast of Love)

"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 Feast of Love)

"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 (Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction)

"Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream."
— Charles Baxter (The Feast of Love)

""[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.""
— 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 (El Festin Del Amor)

"it helps that in michigan everyone goes inside from november through april. but from may until october they are outside, on display, and all of a sudden if you are single, you have a window to heaven and no way at all to get in."
— Charles Baxter (The Soul Thief: A Novel)

"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 (The Feast of Love)

""The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness." "
— Charles Baxter (The Feast of Love)

"There is no weather in malls."
— Charles Baxter (The Feast of Love)

"There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her."
— Charles Baxter (The Feast of Love)

"I am glimmerless."
— 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

""She'd like to say something about the metaphors of space. She won't, but she'd like to. In many religions, the sun is viewed as an analogue to God, and in some Near Eastern cults, the fire cults that interested Nietzsche, the sun is a diety, the origin of all energy, heat, light, and life. A masculine force, this sun, countered by the feminine lucent moon, mutable, pale pink at the horizon, grayish white overhead, and silver in daytime. The moon is a friend to women. Its attraction, its capacity to pull objects toward itself, is traditionally a metaphor for womanly force. Lovers know and understand the moon as a sign for love: a cliché, certainly, but one that does not wear out. "The Moon," they whisper, infinitely.""
— Charles Baxter

"“Oh”, he said. He was trying to smile, but it was a brave smile, a sickroom smile, and I was sorry I had caused it. I had apparently taken the wind out of his sails. His discouragement wasn’t a good sign. Men should stand up to me more than that. They have to fight back to satisfy me. They have to face me down."
— Charles Baxter (The Feast of Love)

"The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think."
— Charles Baxter (Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction)

"You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have."
— Charles Baxter (El Festin Del Amor)

"You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that."
— Charles Baxter (El Festin Del Amor)

"Everybody should customize their names."
— Charles Baxter (The Feast of Love)

"Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn't have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us."
— 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 Feast of Love)

""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 Soul Thief: A Novel)

"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 (The Feast of Love)

"Ethics is a dream."
— Charles Baxter (The Feast of Love)

"In February, the overcast sky isn’t gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It’s a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you’re inside, the snow clings to you psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely."
— Charles Baxter (The Feast of Love)

"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 (The Feast of Love)

"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

"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 (The Soul Thief: A Novel)

""His was the kind of beauty for which you would pay the price of a lifetime of sorrow and all the varieties of rage. Eventually, you would have to go to church to get rid of him."

"
— Charles Baxter (Saul and Patsy)

"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

"Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too."
— Charles Baxter (The Feast of Love)