Best 10 quotes of Glenway Wescott on MyQuotes

But let us laugh carelessly like other men. Let us be timid even among fools. Let us knot silence around our throats. For they would surely kill us.

It is not love, but lack of love which is blind.

Life goes on and on after one's luck has run out. Youthfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young.

New York City is a great apartment hotel in which everyone lives and no one is at home.

There must always be some pretentiousness about literature, or else no one would take its pains or endure its disappointments.

Time is the nervous system of narration, whether factual or fictive. If it gets confused some of the minutiae of human nature are certain not to work, not to glow, not to strike home.

For Alwyn's grandfather, who was known as "the greatest talker in the country," used words which no one else understood, words which he did not understand, and words which do not exist, to swell a passionate theme, to confound his neighbors in an argument, and for their own sake. He would say, for example, "My farm was the very apocalypse of fertility, but the renter has rested on his oars till it is good for nothing," or "Manifest the bounty to pass the salt shaker in my direction." Something of the Bible, something of an Irish inheritance, something of a liar's anxiety, made of his most ordinary remark a strange and wearisome oratory.

Hugo, child, have I ever said that I loved you? Do you know that your fists are clenched? You aren't going to strike me-' She had smiled. Then he had burst into tears. He had never mentioned love either, but it had not occurred to him that it might not be identical with what they had enjoyed.

People as a rule do mean much more than they understand.

The boy thought, How powerful a story is, and how by a kind of magic it compels the imagination; there was nothing in the world, it seemed to him, so mysteriously strong; and he began to wonder if he would ever have anything as beautiful to tell.