The Late Americans Quotes

“They all were going around all the time trying to prove themselves, litigating the case for their own worth.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“What he believed was that love was more than just kindness and more than just giving people the things they wanted. Love was more than the parts of it that were easy and pleasurable. Sometimes love was trying to understand. Love was trying to get beyond what was hard. Love, love, love.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“Or maybe everyone was a prodigy if they worked hard enough and long enough and became, at a young age, competent at a thing. Perhaps what people misjudged for prodigious talent was really just unexpected competence.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“There was a resinous, burning taste in Noah’s mouth, and he wondered if it was from the semen or the cigarette or the pepper on the trout at dinner.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“He put his head against the desk, hating the feel of himself.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“Loving people was hard. It was difficult sometimes to believe that they were good. It was hard to know them. But that didn’t mean you could just go on without trying”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“At times like this when two people he liked very much did not like each other, Noah wondered what to make of the pernicious nature of loyalty. You couldn’t be all things to all people, and any friendship contained such microbetrayals.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“This wasn’t poetry. This was the aping of poetry in pursuit of validation. This was another kind of poetry theatric: If you just said enough names, people assumed you knew what you were talking about and tended to attribute the vagueness of the reference to their own ignorance.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“That’s how young they still were, that they made plans to do something bad.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“Like a dog finally catching its tail and chewing it down to the gristle.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“The instructor, never quite in contention for the Pulitzer but never quite out of it either, nods slowly as he presides over them like a fucking youth minister.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“Naive enough to believe in poetry’s transformative force, but cynical enough in their darker moments to consider poetry a pseudo-spiritual calling, something akin to the affliction of televangelists.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“The stars, he thought, had been watching him his whole life. They'd seen the whole thing go on and on. Him and the rest of all the people who had ever lived and ever would. It was like living in a museum exhibit or a dollhouse. It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives on their circuits like little automatons in an exhibit called The Late Americans. A God with a Gorgon's head peering down in judgment. What were you supposed to do in the face of that? Turn to stone?”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans: A Novel

“Not sisters. High-intensity mutual exclusion.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“The summer he turned seventeen, Ivan remembered, he had lain awake in his bed, thinking how stupid it all seemed. To have given so much and to have tried so hard, only to come up against the hard fact of biology. He had lain in bed for hours and hours that summer, burning up with anger, until he vibrated with it. What a cruel fact of the world, that you could live your whole life in sight of what you want most and still find yourself unable to attain it, because of some vicious quirk.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“He had wanted to ask why it was that people found it so much easier to extend charity to the anonymous herd beasts of the field than to other people. Loving people was hard. It was difficult sometimes to believe that they were good. It was hard to know them. But that didn’t mean you could just go on without trying. What he believed was that love was more than just kindness and more than just giving people the things they wanted. Love was more than the parts of it that were easy and pleasurable. Sometimes love was trying to understand. Love was trying to get beyond what was hard. Love, love, love.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“Sometimes what she thinks is that she'd like nothing from life except to be free to change her mind at any moment. She'd like freedom from having to feed herself or buy clothes or pay bills, material freedom. But she does not have that. So she is returning to her parents, where she will work at a corner store and save up money to move to New York. Everyone saves and scrimps just to suffer and struggle so that they can say that they lived, that they tried. How stupid. How stupid. How stupid.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“What a cruel fact of the world, that you could live your whole life in sight of what you want most and still find yourself unable to attain it, because of some vicious quirk.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans: A Novel