Charles Baxter (author) Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

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

Charles Baxter
As my mother once said to me, 'They're quite crazy, dear – men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.

Charles Baxter
In February, the overcast sky isn't gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It's a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you're inside, the snow clings to you psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely.

Charles Baxter
Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.

Charles Baxter
What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.

Charles Baxter
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.

Charles Baxter
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.

Charles Baxter
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.

Charles Baxter
I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.

Charles Baxter
The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn't annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth.... In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.

Charles Baxter
You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.

Charles Baxter
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.

Charles Baxter
When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

Charles Baxter
There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.

Charles Baxter
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.

Charles Baxter
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.

Charles Baxter
Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn't have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us.

Charles Baxter
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
You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.

Charles Baxter
The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.

Charles Baxter