Donald Barthelme Quotes
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'The Continental Congress resolved that your famous plainneff and modefty would be ill ferved were it known that a houfe for your horfe was paid for from the public purfe.'
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'How old are you Hogo.' 'Thirty-five Jane. A not unpleasant age to be.' 'You don’t mind then. That you are not young.' 'It has its buggy aspects as what does not?' 'You don’t mind then that you are sagging in the direction of death.' 'No, Jane.'
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MAGGIE: Did you have a good time? HILDA: The affair ran the usual course. Fever, boredom, trapped. MAGGIE: Hot, rinse, spin dry.
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Snow White talking to herself '... No wonder we who are twenty-two don’t trust anybody over twelve. That is where you find people who know the score, under twelve. I think I will go out and speak to some eleven-year-olds, now, to refresh myself. Now or soon.'
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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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'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.'
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Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. They've been a laboratory for everybody.
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No man's plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of God's will.
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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.'
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'Sometimes I see signs on walls saying Kill the Rich,' Clem said. 'And sometimes Kill the Rich has been crossed out and Harm the Rich written underneath. A clear gain for civilization I would say. And the one that says Jean-Paul Sartre Is a Fartre. Something going on there, you must admit. Dim flicker of something. ...'
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I keep wondering if, say, there is intelligent life on other planets, the scientists argue that something like two percent of the other planets have the conditions, the physical conditions, to support life in the way it happened here, did Christ visit each and every planet, go through the same routine, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and so on...
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'I smell fennel,' Launcelot said. 'That reminds me, I should tell you I have discovered a specific for maims. You take salt, good-quality river mud, and bee urine, and slather it on the maim and hold it there for two days. Works like a charm. Gathering the bee urine is a bit of a bore.'
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His examiner...said severely: 'Baskerville, you blank round, discursiveness is not literature.' 'The aim of literature,' Baskerville replied grandly, 'is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.'
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'These games are marvelous,' Amanda said. 'I like them especially because they are so meaningless and boring, and trivial. These qualities, once regarded as less than desirable, are now everywhere enthroned as the key elements in our psychological lives, as reflected in the art of the period as well as-'