Donald Barthelme Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“Any genuine work of art generates new work.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
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“How can you be alienated without first having been connected?”
-- Donald BarthelmeSource : Donald Barthelme (1982). “Sixty stories”, Plume
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“The death of God left the angels in a strange position.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.”
-- Donald BarthelmeSource : Donald Barthelme (1992). “The teachings of Don B.: satires, parodies, fables, illustrated stories, and plays of Donald Barthelme”
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“Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.”
-- Donald BarthelmeSource : 1972 Sadness,'The Rise of Capitalism'.
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“Anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world.”
-- Donald BarthelmeSource : Donald Barthelme (2013). “Snow White”, p.184, Simon and Schuster
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“The writer is one who, emnbarking upon a task, does not know what to do.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
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“I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love.”
-- Donald BarthelmeSource : Donald Barthelme (1981). “Sixty stories”, Putnam Adult
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“And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.”
-- Donald BarthelmeSource : Donald Barthelme (1982). “Sixty stories”, Plume
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“Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“--Why are we fighting them? --They're mad. We're sane. --How do we know? --That we're sane? --Yes. --Am I sane? --To all appearances. --And you, do you consider yourself sane? --I do. --Well, there you have it. --But don't they also consider themselves sane? --I think they know. Deep down. That they're not sane. --How must that make them feel? --Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
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“He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it... he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“There is no moment that exceeds in beauty that moment when one looks at a woman and finds that she is looking at you in the same way that you are looking at her. The moment in which she bestows that look that says, "Proceed with your evil plan, sumbitch.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“Take me home," Snow White said. "Take me home instantly. If there is anything worse than being home, it is being out.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
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“We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on. This "sense" is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having "completed" them.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“No man's plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of God's will.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“I don't believe that we are what we do although many thinkers argue otherwise. I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are -- an imperfect manifestation of a much better totality. Even the best of us sometimes bite off, as it were, less than we can chew.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“Now, here is the point about the self: it is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuff full.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
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“Self-criticism sessions were held, but these produced more criticism than could usefully be absorbed or accomodated.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons.”
-- Donald Barthelme#Dripping Quotes #Instant Gratification Quotes #Instant Quotes
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“HENRY: Now it is necessary to court her, and win her, and put on this clean dressing gown, and cut my various nails, and drink something that will kill the millions of germs in my mouth, and say something flattering, and be witty and bonny, and hale and kinky, all just to ease this wrinkle in the groin. It seems a high price.”
-- Donald Barthelme -
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“Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don't count?”
-- Donald Barthelme -
“How does one conquer fear, Don B.?" "One takes a frog and sews it to one's shoe," he said. "The left or the right?" Don B. gave me a pitying look. "Well, you'd look mighty funny going down the street with only one frog sewed to your shoes, wouldn't you?" he said. "One frog on each shoe.”
-- Donald Barthelme
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