The Fall of Princes Quotes

“I know nothing will happen when I tell you I love you. There’s no way. You’re regular. I’m, well, whatever I am, I’m not regular. I’m not telling you because of that. I’m just telling you so that, when you hail a cab or answer the phone, when you walk into a roomful of strangers, you’ll know that there is somebody in the world who loves you and will always love you, wherever you go, whatever happens, until the end of time. Don’t ever forget that. Promise you will never forget that you are loved.”
― Robert Goolrick, The Fall of Princes

“Sometimes I open or close the store. I have keys. I can go in any time I want. Some days, when it’s my duty to open the store, I go in at eight o’clock, just to be alone and smell all those books around me. Each one is a door. Each one is a world.”
― Robert Goolrick, The Fall of Princes

“I’m not having much of a life. It’s not awful, just ordinary. I am trying to accommodate the memories of the life I had with the life I am now living, and I just can’t do it. After being behind the wheel of a Lamborghini going 140 down Sunset Drive at four a.m., it’s hard to get up and put on a polyester shirt and sell books at Barnes and Noble. But I’m not ashamed of it.”
― Robert Goolrick, The Fall of Princes

“Success has a million musical nuances. Failure is only the monotonous banging of a brass gong.”
― Robert Goolrick, The Fall of Princes

“You have to pretend, when speaking to the ladies in the cake store, that the cake is for a friend, pretend that you’re giving a big party so you need the cake that serves twenty, and you sit at the kitchen table with this enormous and elaborate cake for twenty with your name written in fondant on the top, and you feel worse about yourself than you ever have in your life, but, after the sushi box has been thrown out and the stray drops of soy sauce have been wiped from the Formica table top and the dishes, what few there are, have been washed and put away because you have to hold on to some kind of order or you are lost altogether, you sit down and put a single candle on the cake you bought for yourself and light it and make a wish before blowing it out, and then you cut a big piece of the immense cake and you eat it and you sob as the too-sweet dessert goes into your mouth.”
― Robert Goolrick, The Fall of Princes

“I’m telling you this because . . . because, like, to me, to me at least, the greatest sin is to love somebody and not tell them. That’s the greatest sin.” Then she looked into my eyes, and I saw how deep and gentle was the love she was speaking of. “Because then, when the person you love walks down the street, or walks into a meeting or a room full of strangers, they don’t know that somebody loves them. And that can make all the difference in, like, a person’s confidence and stuff, you know?”
― Robert Goolrick, The Fall of Princes

“Women do that as they age, they lighten, become air, their souls ephemeral with memory and experience. Men become more ponderous with the passing of the years, heavy with regret.”
― Robert Goolrick, The Fall of Princes

“Every week, when I change the sheets, I look at the half of the bed that has not been slept in, as pristine as the day the sheets were changed, and I wonder what happened to the possibilities of my youth. No one has ever slept in that bed but me, and I have only slept on one side of it. In the same chaste, deathlike position every night. All those years. All those years that have passed, in the utter silence of that apartment—silent except for the clink of a knife against a fork, the shutting of a cabinet door, the opening of an envelope.”
― Robert Goolrick, The Fall of Princes

“Why is it that, as we lose our loveliness, the sheen of youth, we lose possibility as well? We acquire, but more is vanished than is given, and nothing makes up for the loss of the swallows at the Sherry, or the Victoria diamond, or the nights at Area when your booted feet ground the glass phials of amyl nitrate into the dance floor.”
― Robert Goolrick, The Fall of Princes

“walk in the middle of the street. At two in”
― Robert Goolrick, The Fall of Princes