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300 Arguments

By Sarah Manguso

🌱 2022-01-23


book on Amazon

Sarah Manguso's micro autobiographical non-fiction is mesmerizing. A mind whose honestly makes me be more vulnerable with myself. This will be on my bookshelf for many years to go. Revising, agreeing and disagreeing with each of these "arguments".

Some of favourite arguments:

  • Inner beauty can fade, too.
  • Like a vase, a heart breaks once. After that, it just yields to its flaws.
  • There will come a time when people decide you’ve had enough of your grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you.
  • Shame needs an excuse to feel ashamed. It apologizes for everything, even itself.
  • The dark owns everything, but our sun comes out often enough that we think the universe is half dark, half light.
  • Bad art is from no one to no one.
  • The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember.
  • After I stopped hoping to outgrow them, my fears were no longer a burden. Hope is what made them a burden.
  • The first beautiful songs you hear tend to stay beautiful because better than beauty, which is everywhere, is the memory of first discovering beauty.
  • In a long relationship, you learn exactly what to do to get each other off. It becomes mechanical. But you also learn exactly what to do to enrage each other. It becomes mechanical. The pleasures of a long relationship are the things that you never quite learn about the other—the ways in which you remain strangers.
  • I’ve written whole books in order to avoid writing other books.
  • One cannot convince another to love anything or anyone. Better than arguing is just pointing and saying Look at that.
  • We hide in plain sight, in our bodies.
  • There truly are two kinds of people: you and everyone else.
  • Failure is good preparation for success, which comes as a pleasant surprise, but success is poor preparation for failure.

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