Matthew Quick Quotes

I guess you could say I'm 'kind' to my past books in the way you might be kind to an old boyfriend you still quite like and bear no grudge against but with whom have absolutely no interest in getting back together.

All these people that I used to know, they're an illusion to me now. Some are mathematicians, some are carpenters' wives.

You have your wonderful memories," people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I’d done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me.

Those yesterdreams were just a cruel and foolish game we used to play, yester-me, yester-you, yesterday.

When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?

All the people we used to know, they're an illusion to me now.

The smiling portrait of you is still hanging on my frowning wall.

In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range

You have all this stuff going on in your head, like, 'I can't believe seven years has gone by, and I'm going to miss all these people.' And I'm like, 'Oh, by the way, Mick Jagger is to my right, and I just danced a waltz with him.' So there's that.

We both know what memories can bring / They bring diamonds and rust.

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

I spent the whole time battering people I liked and singing with my arm round people I loathed.

I love the nostalgic myself. I hope we never lose some of the things of the past.

I'm happy some of the time, and some of the time I'm not. But like when I see a movie, for example, that I really like, that moves me or whatever, it's usually happy and sad at the same time.

Every mile was redolent of associations, which she would not have missed for the world, but each of which made her cry upon 'the days that are no more' with ineffable longing.

I'm horrified to find, as I look at these diaries of twenty-five years ago or more, that I don't remember who the people were. "Bill and Tony were constantly in and out. We went to La Jolla" - or something. I haven't the bluest idea who they were!

I think there's kind of a wave of nostalgia going on right at the moment. You know, people recall an earlier time, which they see as a better time. And I think we just kind of evoke good thoughts when they look at us. That's the feeling I get.

I have a beautiful address book a friend gave me in 1966. I literally cannot open it again. Ever. It sits on the shelf with over a hundred names crossed out. What is there to say? There are no words. I'll never understand why it happened to us.

I have nothing against people getting their band back together, but the artists I love marked a time in my life, and to merge that time with now can be personally depressing.

For years afterwards when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it.

But the original was there as well—more jaded and rudimentary, functional rather than romantic. It fit not just the yellow house but another door, deep within my own heart. One that had been locked so tight for so long that I was afraid to even try it for fear of what might be on the other side

...you can hate a place with all your heart and soul and still be homesick for it.

I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.

I'm filled with a new joy mixed with old grief.