Category Archives: Quotes

We think we know the ones we love, and though we should not be surprised to find that we don’t, it is heartbreak nonetheless. It is the hardest kind of knowledge, not only about another but about ourselves. To see our lives as fiction we have written and believed.

That’s the opening of the new novel The Story of a Marriage, as found in this review.

Admitting to ourselves that we were terribly, terribly wrong about something is never easy. This is particularly difficult when it involves an errant character judgment. The quote above refers to love. It is also true about friendship. When, two years into a friendship, I discover I’ve dramatically mis-understood or mis-judged some aspect of a person’s character (say the person is a compulsive liar and I just missed it) I am less angry at the friend and more angry at myself for failing to see it. And it makes me less certain in my other reads of people. If I was so wrong about Bob, could I also be missing something in Joe?

Since I’m a people person, honing my ability to size people up — my ability to get a sense for someone’s value system, ethical sense, etc — is an on-going challenge.

A reader of My Start-Up Life sends me this Philip Roth quote from American Pastoral. It's excellent and gets to some of the topics discussed on this blog about litmus tests, sizing people up, first impressions, etc.

You get them [people] wrong before you meet them: you get them wrong while you're with them and then you get home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we are alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.