Donald Barthelme Quotes
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'Will you be wanting to contest the divorce?' I asked Mrs. Davis.'I should think not,' she said calmly, 'although I suppose on of us should, for the fun of the thing. An uncontested divorce always seems to me contrary to the spirit of divorce.'
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Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons.
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-There’s a thing the children say. -What do the children say? -They say: Will you always love me? -Always. -Will you always remember me? -Always. -Will you remember me a year from now? -Yes, I will. -Will you remember me two years from now? -Yes, I will. -Will you remember me five years from now? -Yes, I will. -Knock, knock. -Who’s there? -You see?
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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.
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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.
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Poignance is all.
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The center will not hold if it has been spot-welded by an operator whose deepest concern is not with the weld but with his lottery ticket.
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There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.
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BILL: … 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.
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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?
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ANATHEMATIZATION OF THE WORLD IS NOT AN ADEQUATE RESPONSE TO THE WORLD.
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As a magician works with the unique compressibility of doves, finding some, losing others in the same silk foulard, so the rebels fold scratchy, relaxed meanings into their smallest actions.
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As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven’t heard of some of them.
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People who had, in the past, suffered from technophobia suffered even more. Others took other positions. Things were not so bad. Things could be worse. Worse things could be imagined. Worse things had been endured and triumphed over, in the past. This was not the worst. The worst was yet to come.
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Oh, there is nothing better than intelligent conversation except thrashing about in bed with a naked girl and Egmont Light Italic.
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People always like to hear that they’re under stress, makes them feel better. You can imagine what they’d feel if they were told they weren’t under stress.
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My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.
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'The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.'
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My deranged mother has written another book. This one is called The Bough and is even worse that the others. I refer not to its quality-it exhibits the usual 'coruscating wit' and 'penetrating social observation'-but to the extent to which it utilizes, as a kind of mulch pile, the lives of her children.
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I am never needlessly obscure-I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.
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-Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? -Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.
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The actors feel that the music played before the curtain rises will put the audience in the wrong mood. The playwright suggests that the (purposefully lugubrious) music be played at twice-speed. This peps it up somewhat while retaining its essentially dark and gloomy character. The actors listen carefully, and are pleased.
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'It's true,' Carl said, 'with a kind of merde-y inner truth which shines forth as the objective correlative of what actually did happen, back home.'
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'Take me home,' Snow White said. 'Take me home instantly. If there is anything worse than being home, it is being out.'