Charles Baxter Quotes

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.

Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.

You know, very few people really want to become individuals," he says. "People claim they do, but they don't. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that's not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.

The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.

My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.

When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.

In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.