Sarah Manguso quotes:

Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear.

You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing. You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness into brightness.

My existence shrank from an arrow of light pointing into the future forever to a speck of light that was the present moment. I got better at living in that point of light, making the world into that point. I paid close attention to it. I loved it very much.

Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little.

Experience in itself wasn't enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I'd missed it.

I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.

If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it.

Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity.

Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing.

The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know,

This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.

Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.

Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us - by taking everything