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What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you.

Charles Baxter

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Charles Baxter
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As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.
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There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, Mistakes were made, you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.
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When blame has been assigned, the story is over.
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Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.
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[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.
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I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.
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Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.
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Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.
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Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.
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A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.
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At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.
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Literature is not an instruction manual.
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Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.
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Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.
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Everybody should customize their names.
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