Donald Barthelme Quotes
I obey the Commandments, the sensible ones. Where they don’t know what they’re talking about I ignore them. I keep thinking about the story of the two old women in church listening to the priest discoursing on the dynamics of the married state. At the end of the sermon one turns to the other and says, 'I wish I knew as little about it as he does.'
Quotes to Explore
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First, I have to thank God for giving me the gift that he did as well as a second chance for a better life.
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I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.
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New Zealanders have conventions and pleasantries, but we are direct. We are encouraged to be transparent with our behavior and not to employ passive aggression.
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It is a great delusion in those whose understanding has been darkened by self-love, to think that there is any obedience in the subject who tries to draw the superior to what he wishes.
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I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.
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It's a big theme throughout my music to just embrace everything about your own mind and to always feel powerful. It's not just a feminine thing, but for men, too, whether they feel weak, or strong or crazy or reclusive. I want everyone to feel powerful no matter what little beasts they have in their head.
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To prosper and advance, the American business sector is going to need a financial system oriented toward business, not 'home ownership.'
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What man is there, surrounded though he be with the love of wife and children, who does not retain a memory of the romantic affection of boys for each other? Having felt it, he could scarcely have forgotten it, and if he never felt it, he missed one of the most golden of the prizes of youth, unrecapturable in mature life.
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What I believe unites the people of this nation, regardless of race or region or party, young or old, rich or poor, is the simple, profound belief in opportunity for all - the notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can get ahead.
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You gotta give everybody a new trend a new wave, something new to do.
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Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.
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You should not do an autobiography if you want to tell the truth. There are a lot of things I know about people. If I can't say something good about a person, I don't want to say anything. And since I don't want to say anything bad, I won't write a book.
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I had wanted to be a sculptor throughout life, but to do so, I had to stop painting.
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Personally, fame never really played any part in our family life.
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When I started out in life I wanted to teach.
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Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning.
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The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.
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Terrorism is a significant threat to peace and security, prosperity and people.
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Samuel Johnson called it the vanity of human wishes, and Buddhists talk about the endless cycle of desire. Social psychologists say we get trapped on a hedonic treadmill. What they all mean is that we wish, plan and work for things that we think will make us happy, but when we finally get them, we aren't nearly as happy as we thought we'd be.
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People talk as if grief were just a feeling -- as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.
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There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine.
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I would like to think I'm a good secret-keeper, when it comes to friends. I'm quite loyal like that.
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I obey the Commandments, the sensible ones. Where they don’t know what they’re talking about I ignore them. I keep thinking about the story of the two old women in church listening to the priest discoursing on the dynamics of the married state. At the end of the sermon one turns to the other and says, 'I wish I knew as little about it as he does.'
