Cleanness Quotes

“That's the worst thing about teaching, that our actions either have no force at all or have force beyond all intention, and not only our actions but our failures to act, gestures and words held back or unspoken, all we might have done and failed to do; and, more than this, that the consequences echo across years and silence, we can never really know what we've done.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“You can call out for anything you desire, however aberrant or unlikely, and nearly always there comes an answer, it's a large world, we're never as solitary as we think, as unique or unprecedented, what we feel has always already been felt, again and again, without beginning or end.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“I wanted to root into him, even as the wind said all rootedness was a sham, there were only passing arrangements, makeshift shelters and poor harbors, I love you, I thought suddenly in that rush that makes so much seem possible, I love you, anything I am you have use for is yours.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“Even annoyance was part of the pleasure we took in each other, we were that early in love.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“He would be all right, I thought again, comforting myself by thinking it, though I thought too that he wasn’t altogether mistaken in what he had said, that there would be loss in loving another, that the perspective that limited his grief would also limit his love, which, having taken the measure of its bounds, he could never again imagine as boundless. And I had thought this before, too, how much we lose in gaining this truer version of ourselves, the vision I had urged upon my student, the vision it was my obligation to urge, though it carried us away from our dreams of ourselves, from the grandeur of novels and poems which it was also my obligation to impart. How much smaller I have become, I said to myself, through an erosion necessary to survival perhaps and perhaps still to be regretted, I’ve worn myself down to a bearable size.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“It was a habit of mine, to rush toward an ending once I thought I could see it, as if the fact of loss were easier to bear than the chance of it.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“Anything I am you have use for is yours.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“I wanted to ruin what he had made, what he had made me, I mean, the person he had made me.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“I’ve worn myself down to a bearable size.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“I had never wanted permanence before, not really, or I had wanted my freedom more; I had accepted that passionate feeling faded, all my earlier experience had confirmed it, when love that seemed certain simply dissolved, on one side or both, for no particular reason, leaving little trace.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“When we got to my apartment that first time, before we moved into the bedroom, while we were still taking pleasure in delay,”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“He pulled a few pages from his bag and sort them toward me, saying Here, I've been working more on this. I was disappointed to see the slightest of the poems he had given me on top, a generic hymn to a feminine ideal, full of exaggerated praise and capitalize pronouns. It was the same draft I had seen already, the page full of my corrections and suggestions, advice I feel obligated to give even unpromising student work. You corrected so much, he said, but you didn't correct the most important mistake. I looked down at the page and then up again, confused; I don't see it, I said, what did I miss? He leaned across the table, reaching his arms toward the page that his upper body rested on the lacquered wood, a peculiarly teenage gesture, I thought, I remembered making it but haven't made it for years, and he pressed his finger to the margin of the page. Here, he said, pointing to a line where the single word She appeared, I made it here and it happens several times, the pronouns are all wrong, and even in his half-prone posture I could see that his whole body was tense. Ah, I said, looking up at him from the page, I see, and then he leaned quickly back, as if released by something, and as though after his revelation he wanted to reassert some space between us. I leaned back too, and pushed the pages across to him again; it was clear that they had served their purpose.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“Finally he laid his head on my chest. Don’t be like that, he said again as I put my arms around him. Do you see? You don’t have to be like that, he said. You can be like this.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“We can never be sure of want, of the authenticity of it, of its purity in relation to ourselves.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“People have to come together without losing their ability to think, Whitman calls it a “thoughtful merge,” the whole idea of democracy depends on it.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“That's the worst thing about teaching, that our actions either have no force at all or have force beyond all intention, an not only our actions but our failures to act, gestures and words held back or unspoken, all we might have done and failed to do; and, more than this, that the consequences echo across years and silence, we can never really know what we've done.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness