Charles D'Ambrosio Quotes

• “Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere?”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “My ideal life is a quiet one. I like to read, to sit still in the same chair, with the lampshade at a certain angle, alone, or with Meagan nearby, and now and then, if I'm lucky, I'll come across a lovely phrase or fine sentiment, look up from my book, and feel the harmony of some notion, the justice of it, and know that everything is there. That's life to me, those privately discovered moments.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “her knees, which looked, in the faint blue light, as though they'd been carved by water from a bar of soap.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “I've often thought that the unit of measure that best suits prose is the human breath”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “Yeah, well, I wanted to be a screenwriter, and guess what? I am one. That's the other tragedy in life.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “it’s nearly impossible to convey our deepest passions yet damned easy to share what’s dullest and worst about ourselves.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “We wake out of our dreams and wonder where the blood in our hands came from.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “The canker of self-consciousness has been long in me, so like a lot of writers I not only do a thing, I see myself doing it too—it’s almost like not being alone. That morning our hero skipped in his skivvies down to the shore of the sea . . . it was dark . . . the fog . . . Storytelling!”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “It's hard to kill yourself by taking Tylenol. You die from liver failure, which takes a long time...”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “...the boy saw faces disinigrate before his eyes, faces that fell to pieces, then disappeared, leaving a hole.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “We are more intimately bound to one another by our kindred doubts than our brave conclusions.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “Alone, you're vastly outnumbered; but in the company of another, by some weird miracle of human math, the odds seem wonderfully improved in your favor.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “You want to find your self in the flow of time, miraculously relieved of your irrelevance . . . I saw the pursuit of historical beauty, the yearning for those higher essences other people had staked their lives on, as the hope for some kind of voice, a chance to join the chorus. I was mad for relevance, connection, some hint that I was not alone. I started scribbling in notebooks in part just so I’d have an excuse, a reason for sitting where I sat, an alibi for being by myself.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “Being suicidal is really tiring. A lot of suicides are so lacking in affect and so lethargic that they aren’t able to kill themselves until their mood improves—spring, for that reason, has the highest rate of what people in the business call “completed” suicides.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “What kind of damage is done to our ability to love or understand and thus fully judge one another when daily we’re encouraged to forget that people are people and view them instead as so much pasteboard, scenery, clutter, generalized instances (of murder, of rape, of embezzlement, etc.)?”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “You all have stories, Sandy said. And we have secrets”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “By the strident and aggressive tenor of the talk you couldn’t tell if this Bonnie Hart entertained any doubt, then or ever, she was so careful not to cross herself, so careful to arrange her moral outrage along the lines of least resistance. In a sense the whole program was about Hart rendering the round world flat and endorsing lopsidedness, halfness. This seemed a crude and retrogressive project, since what really distinguishes us from apes is not the opposable thumb but the ability to hold in mind opposing ideas, a distinction we should probably try to preserve. But these days you get the impression people think it’s kind of recreant to waver, as if by feeling and expressing, or worst of all admitting, doubt and uncertainty, you’re being disloyal to a guiding idea.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “If you can love abstractly, you’re only a bad day away from hating abstractly.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “Al tended the bar at night. He’d been in the merchant marine and ate with a fat clunky thumb holding down his plate, as if he were afraid the whole place might pitch and yaw and send his dinner flying. He was dwarfish and looked like an abandoned sculpture, a forgotten intention. His upper body was a slablike mass, a plinth upon which his head rested; he had a chiseled nose and jaw, a hack-job scar of a mouth; his hands were thick and stubby, more like paws than anything prehensile. Sitting back behind the bar, smoking Pall Malls, he seemed petrified, the current shape of his body achieved by erosion, his face cut by clumsy strokes and blows. His eyes, though, were soft and blue, always wet and weepy with rheum, and when you looked at Al, you had the disorienting sense of something trapped, something fluid and human caught inside the gray stone vessel of his gargoyle body, gazing out through those eyes. He was my only real neighbor. At closing he’d collect the glasses, wipe down the bottles, shut the blinds, and go to sleep on the bar. In the morning he’d fold his blankets and stow them away in a cardboard box.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “Meanwhile, back in the real world, my first instinct is a sort of stupid ducking motion I’ve learned from the movies, and I have the sure sense I’m going to be shot in the neck, where I feel particularly exposed and vulnerable.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “Nowadays I feel like an old-timer in terms of estrangement. I don't know what determines meaning in the city any better than these old people with their attenuating memories. Probably traffic laws, the way we still agree to agree on the detonation of stop signs.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “One of the truths about suicide is that it’s hardly ever about the future. It’s the past the suicide can’t face, and although disgrace appears to be the exception, the one instance where suicide seems to be about the future, even in Oedipus, it’s her past Jocasta can’t accept, once it’s come to light.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “We wake out of our dreams and wonder where the blood on our hands came from. Knowledge happens just about as often as shit, while innocence is probably returned to by taking yet another bite of the apple, not by pretending there never was a Fall in the first place.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “We shoot our heroes and enjoy peripeteia as a spectacle akin to sport and perhaps harshly disavowing the past protects us from the disappointment of our outsized hopes--who knows, really, but shifts in taste don't fully account for the phenomenon. At any rate, nearly everything urgent and alive becomes doo-wop down the road, at least in this country's pop culture, and along the way a somewhat self-hating irony lays waste not only to the work but to the desires it once carried. It's like we die into adulthood.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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• “Hatred’s destination is boredom, and boredom is perhaps a rebellion against time; it’s the finished putting up a fight with the end.”

  Charles D'Ambrosio

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