Matthew Quick Quotes

“I am practicing being kind over being right.”

— Matthew Quick

Looking into another person's eyes for an extended period of time proved to be a powerful thing. And if you don't believe me, try it yourself.

— Matthew Quick

“And I still love you in my own fucked-up way. I miss you, I really do. Can we still be friends?”

— Matthew Quick

“When I wrote 'Silver Linings,' I thought I was writing a book about the Philadelphia Eagles and male bonding, but when the book came out, it was surprising to me that the mental health community embraced it.”

— Matthew Quick

“I need you so fucking bad.”

— Matthew Quick

“I believe in happy endings," I tell him, "And it feels like this movie has gone on for the right amount of time.”

— Matthew Quick

“Someday an opportunity will come. Think about Harry Potter. His life is terrible, but then a letter arrives, he gets on a train, and everything is different for him afterward. Better. Magical."
"That's just a story."
"So are we- we're stories too.”

— Matthew Quick

When people have awful ideas about your identity, that's just the way it will stay no matter what you do.

— Matthew Quick

“And I understood why he didn't need friends or to be accepted at our shitty racist high school, because he had his music, and that was so much better than anything we had to offer.”

— Matthew Quick

“Your mother is risking a lot, because she believes in you.”

— Matthew Quick

Only you weren't regular at all
you were full of magic.

— Matthew Quick

“You may exist in
this world
but I exist too
and I will not yield”

— Matthew Quick

I can always look up at the cosmos and marvel, no matter what happens. And when I look up at it, I feel as though my problems are small. I don't know why, but it always makes me feel better.

— Matthew Quick

Because you start a revolution one decision at a time, with each breath you take.

— Matthew Quick

“Tiffany and I are great friends, and I appreciate all that she is doing for me now. But she is
not you. I still love you, Nikki. And you can't control or alter true love.”

— Matthew Quick

“I do this! Time after time after time! I do all this shit for other people! And then I wake up and I'm empty! I have nothing!”

— Matthew Quick

“I remembered a line I read in the Dalai Lama's book A Profound Mind. "It is important that we understand just how truly all-pervasive suffering is." I remembered the Dalai Lama saying it is easy to feel sorry for an elderly beggar, but it is much harder to feel sorry for a young rich man. He also said that all "conditioned existence is characterized by pain." And that all types of people are "enslaved" by "strong destructive emotions.”

— Matthew Quick

“Then we talked a lot about our parents and how we didn't want to become them, but we had no other role models
or "maps," Alex kept saying. "My father is a terrible map, mostly because he doesn't ever lead me anywhere." And I thought about my parents being maps that led to places I didn't want to go
and it made a shocking amount of sense, using the word maps to describe parents. If almost made you feel like you could fold Mom and Dad up and lock them away in the glove compartment of your car and just joyride for the rest of your life maybe.”

— Matthew Quick

“This next song is familiar-surprisingly gentle, like a kitten walking through high grass-and it seems so unlike Jake to create something this beautiful.”

— Matthew Quick

“Pretending often ends when you allow nonpretenders access to the better, safer worlds you create for yourself.”

— Matthew Quick

“I have to admit that Emily is a cute kid, and I instantly understand why Ronnie has written me so many letters about his daughter-why he loves her so much. I start to think about having children with Nikki someday and I become so happy that I give little Emily a kiss on the forehead, as if she were Nikki's baby and I was her father. And then I kiss Emily's forehead again and again, until she giggles.”

— Matthew Quick

“How do you measure suffering? I mean, the fact that I live in a democratic country doesn't guarantee my life will be problem-free. Far from it. I understand that I am relatively privileged from a socioeconomical viewpoint, but so was Hamlet-so are a lot of miserable people. I bet there are people in Iran who are happier than I am-who wish to keep living there regardless of who is in charge politically, while I'm miserable here in this supposedly free country and just want out of this life at any cost.”

— Matthew Quick

“(I have to say that everything seems to be unraveling lately. Or maybe it seems as though I am a flower myself, opening up to the world for the first time. I don't know why this is, and I'm not really in control of it either. Flowers do not think, Okay, it is now May, so I will reach up toward the sun and relax my fist of petals into an open hand. They do not think at all. Flowers just grow, and when it is time, they shoot colors out of their stems and become beautiful.”

— Matthew Quick

And so maybe it isn't the motivating factors that matter so much as simply participating - thrusting your best true, authentic self into the universe with wild abandon. Maybe yielding to our true nature propels us forward into the great unknown, toward targets that we haven't even dreamed up yet but exist nonetheless.

— Matthew Quick

“So I close my eyes, hum a single note, and silently count to ten, blanking my mind”

— Matthew Quick

Why is it that some people are born into fantastic situations and others wait their whole lives for a break?

— Matthew Quick

“Why is it that the people who are very good at answering difficult questions never get asked difficult questions, while people like me are always being forced to do things that are seemingly impossible?”

— Matthew Quick

“There are no guarantees when it comes to such treacherous things as friendship. It's a tricky business.”

— Matthew Quick

“Irish ex-priests don't succumb to drunkenness, we just become more talkative on whiskey,”

— Matthew Quick

“The voice that navigated was definitely that of a machine, and yet you could tell that the machine was a woman, which hurt my mind a little. How can machines have genders? The machine also had an American accent. How can machines have nationalities? This can't be a good idea, making machines talk like real people, can it? Giving machines humanoid identities?”

— Matthew Quick

“It's like the P-38 is an old skeleton key I'm trying to fit into an old padlock and when I make that connection I'll hear a click and a door will open and I'll walk through and be saved.”

— Matthew Quick

“God doesn't do coincidences. You can bet your ass.”

— Matthew Quick

You might like that one. But I'll tell you the same thing I tell my students when they complain about the depressing nature of American literature: life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly ( ... )

— Matthew Quick

I've found that being blunt sometimes makes life easier for everyone

— Matthew Quick

“She gazes into her own pupils and sees the void that opened up inside of her, swallowing everything like some black hole of happiness ...”

— Matthew Quick

“It's not sexual
it's modern dance.”

— Matthew Quick

Did that ever happen to you? You think someone is really important and different, but then you get to know them and it ruins everything? Do you know what I'm talking about?

— Matthew Quick

“Do people actually do that
go back and thank their teachers years later, when they're no longer handicapped by youth and ignorance, when they figure out just how much their teachers actually did for them?”

— Matthew Quick

“The world doesn't really care too much about what you do sometimes - as long as you let certain types carry on en masse without you.”

— Matthew Quick

“He [Alex] was more of an idea than a true friend or a lover. We never got the chance to really know each other or test our compatibility over a significant period of time. I see now that he was sick - that maybe he pushed his needle too far away from the middle of the herd. But being with him for a short time helped push my needle just enough to free me from the life I hated, what everyone expected of me. And even though I have no idea what comes next, I'm grateful that I'm not signed up for a life that would make me miserable.”

— Matthew Quick

“And the whole time I wished your mind was a sea we could scuba dive in together because I'd like to see the LOVE statue that sits at the bottom of your consciousness.”

— Matthew Quick

“Linda doesn't like to give out her cell number to "non-industry people," like the office workers at my high school, because she thinks she's Donatella Versace.”

— Matthew Quick

“( ... ) and as I sat in bed thinking of the many good things that had to happen all over the world in order to even out and nullify the horrible bad things that had happened to Mom and me, I started to see why Mom believed in the Good Luck of Right Now. Believing - or maybe even pretending - made you feel better about what had happened, regardless of what was true and what wasn't.
And what is reality, if it isn't how we feel about things?
what else matters at the end of the day when we lie in bed alone with our thoughts?
and isn't it true, statistically speaking - regardless of whether we believe in luck or not - that good and bad must happen simultaneously all over the world?”

— Matthew Quick

“You pick up goals and hopes along the way. Don't worry, there are more in your future. You'll”

— Matthew Quick

Not good, but sometimes necessary when people try to make you believe you are secondary or that you shouldn't even exist. Why do you think we study wars in history class? How many months do we spend on World War II alone? When someone evil crosses that line - like Hitler or Mussolini or Tojo or more they teach us. So why is it okay for our government to drop bombs on people and kill with guns, but we aren't supposed to use our fists to protect ourselves? This country was founded on and by violence.

— Matthew Quick

And I wondered if that was the problem with literature - it made sense only in theoretical situations and didn't often help in real life, where it took a hell of a lot more courage to live than to turn pages all alone, hidden away from the world in a corner or a bed or under a tree.

— Matthew Quick

“Every day, the pretty boys ask how I'm doing and if anyone is messing around with me - as if anyone else would torture me. It's kind of weird and I think I liked it better when they were just mean to me all the time, as strange as that sounds. Their being nice is like eternally having a boa constrictor around your neck and pretending that it will never choke you to death.”

— Matthew Quick

Everyone who ever did anything revolutionary was just an eighteen-year-old kid once. George Washington, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela ... Social status is just a social construct, the primary function of which is to keep regular people oppressed and rebels in line.

— Matthew Quick

“Her eyes are sometimes the colour of a May sky at 2:00pm on a Saturday, and sometimes they are the colour of polar bear ice.”

— Matthew Quick

“Weird, lonely people need each other.”

— Matthew Quick