The End of the World as We Know It Quotes

“If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven't had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I would give anything, anything, to be the man to whom this has not happened. I can not accommodate myself to it. In a lifetime of trying, I can not accommodate myself to it.

And now I will have to be that person forever.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I wasn't safe. I wasn't permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn't there. There was nobody home.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Their love for me was both a myth and a torture and so I wrecked everything. I hurt them, and I left them hurting.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“There is a loveliness to life that does not fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency toward grace that does not fail us. ”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I think kissing is what separates us from the animals and makes us divine.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I know that I am not the only person who is alone in the world. I know that others sorrow in the night. That others pick up a razor and slice into their own skin, with greater or lesser success. I know that others look at their lives and see only silent failure and disconsolation, feeding the cat, checking their email, doing the crossword. I know that I am not the only person to have lived a life like mine. I am aware. (212)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I tell these stories because I have lied about my life to people who have been kind to me and I am tired of lying. I tell it because I don't want people to think that I have fucked up my life over and over just because I was in a bad mood.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“How most people carry on is a mystery. What they talk about at supper. How they can stand to sit in front of a TV from eight until Leno every night. How they can think bowling is fun. How they choose their neckties. How they bear the weight of everyday life without screaming. How a person can go through a whole life and never once contemplate suicide, like people who have never once wanted to be a movie star. How one young man can be handsome and strong and marry and heiress and work at Debevoise and Plimpton and retire to Nantucket to await the visits of his grandchildren, how they can be sailing in the bay while another young man, exactly like the first, can end up in a glass room in Lexington, Kentucky, on Haldol and Thorazine, without hope, without a girlfriend, without a future, and how easily the one can become the other. How one woman can take Gatorade to every one of her son's lacrosse games and another can lie in bed all day weeping, popping generic drugs, watching Oprah as though waiting for the Second Coming, and piling her dirty dishes in the laundry room. How life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep. It's a mystery and there is no answer. (95)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Even if we choose to sever the ties to all we ever knew as home, to redefine the spaces we live in, the emotions that seem most natural to us, the ways we have of loving, there is a haunting feeling of loss and admiration for the people we knew first and best. Even if we never speak to them again, they are our first and purest loves. There is, for all of us, a time in which they meant the world. Sometimes, that time lasts as long as we live. It is eternal as breath. It is changeless and deathless. Sometimes, it ends at a very early age. Sometimes, we cannot help ourselves. Things happen. (203)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Somewhere in the pain there is pleasure, and that is the most awful part, perhaps. (170)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“We tend to go on loving the things the people who loved us loved. They are invested with soul, even if the people are long dead, even if they do not turn out to be who you thought they were.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“In times of grief, you're waiting for something to happen, but the thing you're waiting for has already taken place.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“There was so much we had done to ourselves, so much we said in our sessions that our hearts were rent with sorrow. There is so much that happens to the human heart that is in the realm of the unthinkable, the unknowable, the unbearable. (95)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“We want to do something with the time we have, something that will give that time a certain meaning, a certain weight.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“How life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I heard this old country guy say once, "I think you decide pretty early on how happy you're going to be, and then you just go on and be it." But I don't think that's the case for a lot of people. For a lot of people, for a lot of the people I met in the bin, I think personal choice has very little to do with it.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“In a life, in any life, bad things happen. Many good things happen, of course, we know what they are-joy, tenderness, success beauty-but some bad things happen as well. Sometimes, very bad things happen. Children sicken and die. People we love don't love us, can never love us.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Soul murder, the psychiatrists call it, the sexual violation of children. Unimaginably small boys. Boys whose heads do not reach to their father's waists. Girls who are no more than infants. Boys and girls whose lives are ineradicably violated. Whose trust and innocence are lost to them forever. (208)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“What makes a child of four realize that something awful is going to happen? (168)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“But I told my grandmother, and she listened, and then she said, "Don't ever tell this story to anybody else. If you tell this story to anybody else, something terrible will happen. Something terrible will happen to our family." And then she had a lot to do. (174)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Here's another thing: There are certain wounds that never heal, certain hurts that never leave you alone, like a broken bone that heals wrong and always twinges when it's about to rain.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“I loved kissing them on the mouth, the taste of their tongues. I think kissing is what separated us from the animals and makes us divine.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“But I don't think that's the case for a lot of people. For a lot of people, for a lot the people I met in the bin, I think personal choice has very little to do with it.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“You wreck your own life and then, very gently, you wreck the lives of those around you.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it, like an amputee who never stops missing his leg, like the ex-smoker who wants a cigarette after lunch fifteen years later. It sounds trite. It's true.

You will look for it in objects that you buy without want. You will look for it in faces you do not desire. You will look for it in expensive hotel rooms... You will look for it in shopgirls and the kind of sad and splendid men who sell you clothing. You will look for it. And you will never find it. You will not find a trace.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be. — Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life (Algonquin Books, March 23, 2007)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life