Starting Out in the Evening Quotes

“What matters, finally, isn't finding the kind of person you think you should
love. What matters is finding someone you feel more alive with.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“...an artist doesn't really need a great deal of experience. One heartbreak can produce many novels. But you have to have a heart that can break.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“A trip to the market in the morning to buy bread, an afternoon spent reading in a cafe—nothing was routine; a strange place helped you find the poetry in everyday life.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“You understood me; you helped me understand myself. If reading a book is a naked encounter between two people, I have known you nakedly for years.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“The thing is to let life assault you, make yourself as defenseless as you can. If it bruises you, don't protest. Love your fate.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“The moments of beauty, the moments when you feel blessed, are only moments; but memory and imagination, treasuring them, can string them together... Everything else passes away; that which you love remains.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“To sit across the table and talk with someone you love is itself a complex engagement, with an exhaustingly subtle flow of information; to go to bed with someone--to carry your conversation into the realm of the body, a realm of insecurity and fear as well as pleasure--was always fraught with the sad evidence of how difficult it is to understand another person and make yourself understood.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“Life takes place in restaurants.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“Coincidence. But the eagerness to find meaning in such coincidences is love.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“His kisses were too rote; they were assembly-line kisses. She wanted complex kisses; she wanted each kiss to be a conversation.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“It wasn’t that she wanted to seduce him—not literally. But flirting was a pleasure, and flirting with intelligent people—male or female—was one of the supreme pleasures of life.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“There are certain situations in which you can't convey what you mean. Words don't always work.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“...they hadlived, they'd lived intensely. But no matter how deeply you live, it comes to this in the end: one of you will be gone and the other will be in mourning.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“A man can't understand how a woman feels--how she can offer up her entire life to him. The man thinks she's bringing him a burden. He doesn't understand that she's trying to give him a gift.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“It's foolish to speak of your happiness before you're sure you have it.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“Subtlety and indirection are important tools, but you can't scale the highest peaks with these tools alone.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“So you can keep going. You can stay young. There's no inevitable law of diminishment: everyone who fades fades for his own reason.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“So much of human life is animal life: we respond to each other as animals.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“He had found himself ridiculously impressed by this young woman. She would blow in like a little whirlwind, eager to hear him say wise things; and he wanted to have wise things to say—he wanted to be worthy of her admiration.
More than that. He wanted her to be in love with him. Idiotic, but true.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“Two heavyset, rough-looking men were arguing about politics, and he was struck anew by a thought he used to have often when he lived here: there is no such thing as a French tough guy. A French tough guy, even if he’s tough as nails, speaks French, and therefore isn’t very tough at all. These men looked like boxers, but they were speaking a feminine language and sipping daintily from tiny espresso cups. Schiller, six-foot-something and wide, always felt terribly manly in France, the land of fragile men.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“But. There’s always a “but” in life, isn’t there?”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“But his life consisted, for the most part, of writing and reading. He wrote during the day, read at night, went to bed early, and did the same thing the next day.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“Heather resented it that this woman was his daughter. How does a writer of the most subtle, serious fiction end up with a daughter who watches Oprah? I’d be a better daughter for him than she is.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“When she was little, her father, just before he went to bed, used to check his watch and ask in surprise, “How did it get so late so early?”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“And the trick to making anyone happy, and making yourself happy in the bargain, is to bring them not only what they ask for, but to bring them extras.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“Maybe there was nothing to be done but wait out his adolescence, and hope that at the end of it all he might be a person who would want to talk to you.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“Schiller had no illusions about the scale of his own achievement, but he had tried, through art, to bring a little more beauty, a little more tolerance, a little more coherence into the world, and now he felt he had earned the right to look back at the statue with an unembarrassed eye.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“A man can’t understand how a woman feels—how she can offer up her entire life to him. The man thinks she’s bringing him a burden. He doesn’t understand that she’s trying to give him a gift.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

“She knew that this relationship wasn’t as important to him as it was to her. If he was being honest he’d probably admit that she was the second most important thing in his life right now.”
― Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening