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Top Donald Barthelme Quotes

Browse top 52 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Donald Barthelme.

Favorite Donald Barthelme Quotes

1. "Fragments are the only forms I trust." ~ Donald Barthelme
2. "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." ~ Donald Barthelme
3. "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." ~ Donald Barthelme
4. "The death of God left the angels in a strange position." ~ Donald Barthelme
5. "--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
6. "—What do the children say?—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?("Great Days," Forty Stories)" ~ Donald Barthelme
7. "Well chaps first I'd like to say a few vile things more or less at random, not only because it is expected of me but also because I enjoy it." ~ Donald Barthelme
8. "There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising." ~ Donald Barthelme
9. "And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love." ~ Donald Barthelme
10. "How can you be alienated without first having been connected?" ~ Donald Barthelme
11. "Mother, have you noticed that this society we're in tends to be a little…repressive?" "What does that mean, Eugenie? What does that mean, that strange new word, ‘repressive,' that I have never heard before?" "It means…it's like when you decide to do something, and you get up out of your chair to do it, and you take a step, and then become aware of frosty glances being directed at you from every side." "Frosty glances?" "Your desires are stifled." "What desires are you talking about?" "Just desires in general. Any desires. It's a whole…I guess atmosphere is the…word…a tendency on the part of the society…" "You'd better sew some more pillow cases, Eugenie." ~ Donald Barthelme
12. "Goals incapable of attainment have driven many a man to despair, but despair is easier to get to than that -- one need merely look out of the window, for example." ~ Donald Barthelme
13. "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
14. "How can he be killed most easily? With the fewest stains?" ~ Donald Barthelme
15. "All of us...still believe that the American flag betokens a kind of general righteousness. But I say...that signs are signs and some of them are lies." ~ Donald Barthelme
16. "You came and fell upon me, I was sitting in the wicker chair. The wicker exclaimed as your weight fell upon me. You were light, I thought, and I thought how good it was of you to do this. We'd never touched before." ~ Donald Barthelme
17. "Anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world." ~ Donald Barthelme
18. "The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude, as when you attend a funeral and notice that it's being poorly done." ~ Donald Barthelme
19. "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
20. "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 Barthelme
21. "See the moon? It hates us." ~ Donald Barthelme
22. "The world in the evening seems fraught with the absence of promise, if you are a married man. There is nothing to do but go home and drink your nine drinks and forget about it." ~ Donald Barthelme
23. "The President looked out of his window. He was not very happy. "I worry about Bill, Hubert, Henry, Kevin, Edward, Clem, Dan and their lover, Snow White. I sense that all is not well with them. Now, looking out over this green lawn, and these fine rosebushes, and into the night and the yellow buildings, and the falling Dow Jones Index and the screams of the poor, I am concerned. I have many important things to worry about, but I worry about Bill and the boys too. Because I am the President. Finally. the President of the whole fucking country. And they are Americans, Bill, Hubert, Henry, Kevin, Edward, Clem, Dan and Snow White. They are Americans. My Americans." ~ Donald Barthelme
24. "I wanted to say a certain thing to a certain man, a certain true thing that had crept into my head. I opened my head, at the place provided, and proceeded to pronounce the true thing that lay languishing there—that is, proceeded to propel that trueness, that felicitous trularity, from its place inside my head out into world life. The certain man stood waiting to receive it. His face reflected an eager accepting-ness. Everything was right. I propelled, using my mind, my mouth, all my muscles. I propelled. I propelled and propelled. I felt trularity inside my head moving slowly through the passage provided (stained like the caves of Lascaux with garlic, antihistamines, Berloiz, a history, a history) toward its debut on the world stage. Past my teeth, with their little brown sweaters knitted of gin and cigar smoke, toward its leap to critical scrutiny. Past my lips, with their tendency to flake away in cold weather—" ~ Donald Barthelme
25. "I have to admit we are locked in the most exquisite mysterious muck. This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multi-directional and has a mayor. To describe it takes many hundreds of thousands of words. Our muck is only a part of a much greater muck -- the nation-state -- which is itself the creation of that muck of mucks, human consciousness. Of course all these things also have a touch of sublimity -- as when Moonbelly sings, for example, or all the lights go out. What a happy time that was, when all the electricity went away! If only we could re-create that paradise! By, for instance, all forgetting to pay our electric bills at the same time. All nine million of us. Then we'd all get those little notices that say unless we remit within five days the lights will go out. We all stand up from our chairs with the notice in ours hands. The same thought drifts across the furrowed surface of nine million minds. We wink at each other, through the walls." ~ Donald Barthelme
26. "-You are killing me."" -We? Not we. Not in any sense, we. Processes are killing you, not we. Inexorable processes." ~ Donald Barthelme
27. "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
28. "in our young manhood we were taught that short, punchy sentences were best (but what did he mean? doesn't "punchy" mean punch-drunk? I think he probably intended to say "short, punching sentences," meaning sentences that lashed out at you, bloodying your brain if possible, and looking up the word just now I came across the nearby "punkah," which is a large fan suspended from the ceiling in India, operated by an attendant pulling a rope—that is what I want for my sentence, to keep it cool!)" ~ Donald Barthelme
29. "mead for my men!" ~ Donald Barthelme
30. "We regarded each other sitting around the breakfast table with its big cardboard boxes of "Fear," "Chix," and "Rats." ~ Donald Barthelme
31. "Machines are braver than art." ~ Donald Barthelme
32. "This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multi-directional and has a mayor." ~ Donald Barthelme
33. "I spoke to Sylvia. "Do you think this is a good life?" ~ Donald Barthelme
34. "Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art." ~ Donald Barthelme
35. "Three rebellions ago, the air was fresher. The soft pasting noises of the rebel billposters remind us of Oklahoma, where everything is still the same." ~ Donald Barthelme
36. "Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole." ~ Donald Barthelme
37. "But we little know until tried how much of the uncontrollable there is in us, urging across glaciers and torrents, and up dangerous heights, let the judgement forbid as it may." ~ Donald Barthelme
38. "... And Harold came into Perpetua's apartment.He said, 'I just want to know one thing. Are you happy?' 'Sure,' Perpetua said. (Donald Barthelme, "Perpetua")" ~ Donald Barthelme
39. "My mother was a royal virgin," Peterson said, "and my father a shower of gold. My childhood was pastoral and energetic and rich in experiences which developed my character. As a young man I was noble in reason, infinite in faculty, in form express and admirable, and in apprehension..." Peterson went on and on and although he was, in a sense, lying, in a sense he was not." ~ Donald Barthelme
40. "Pia was chopping up an enormous cabbage, a cabbage big as a basketball. The cabbage was of an extraordinary size. It was a big cabbage. "That's a big cabbage," Edward said. "Big," Pia said." ~ Donald Barthelme
41. "Let us suppose that someone is writing a story. From the world of conventional signs he takes an azalea bush, plants it in a pleasant park. He takes a gold pocket watch from the world of conventional signs and places it under the azalea bush. He takes from the same rich source a handsome thief and a chastity belt, places the thief in the chastity belt and lays him tenderly under the azalea, not neglecting to wind the gold pocket watch so that its ticking will, at length, awaken the now-sleeping thief. From the Sarah Lawrence campus he borrows a pair of seniors, Jacqueline and Jemima, and sets them to walking in the vicinity of the azalea bush and the handsome, chaste thief. Jacqueline and Jemima have just failed the Graduate Record Examination and are cursing God in colorful Sarah Lawrence language. What happens next? Of course, I don't know." ~ Donald Barthelme
42. "the writer is [...] the work's way of getting itself written" ~ Donald Barthelme
43. "But the lie had to be a good one, because if your lie is badly done it makes everyone feel wretched, liar and lied-to alike plunged into the deepest lackadaisy, and everyone just feels like going into the other room and drinking a glass of water, or whatever is available there, whereas if you can lie really well then get dynamite results, 35 percent report increased intellectual understanding, awareness, insight, 40 percent report more tolerance, acceptance of others, liking for self, 29 percent report they receive more personal and more confidential information from people and that others become more warm and supportive toward them--all in consequence of a finely orchestrated, carefully developed untruth." ~ Donald Barthelme
44. "mad fathers stalk up and down the boulevards, shouting." ~ Donald Barthelme
45. "In this kind of world," Peterson said, "absurd if you will, possibilities nevertheless proliferate and escalate all around us and there are opportunities for beginning again. I am a minor artist and my dealer won't even display my work if he can help it but minor is as minor does and lightning may strike even yet. Don't be reconciled. Turn off your television sets," Peterson said, "cash in your life insurance, indulge in a mindless optimism. Visit girls at dusk. Play the guitar. How can you be alienated without first having been connected? Think back and remember how it was." ~ Donald Barthelme
46. "Little is known about her. We are assured, however, that the same damnable involvements that obsess us obsess her too. Copulation. Strangeness. Applause." ~ Donald Barthelme
47. "I sit down on the curb, outside the Opera. People passing look at me. I will wait here for a hundred years. Or until the hot meat of romance is cooled by the dull gravy of common sense once more" ~ Donald Barthelme
48. "Dun-colored fathers tend to shy at obstacles, and therefore you do not want a father of this color, because life, in one sense, is nothing but obstacles, and his continual shying will reduce your nerves to grease." ~ Donald Barthelme
49. "The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page." ~ Donald Barthelme
50. "the hinder portion scalding-house good eating Curve B in addition to the usual baths and ablutions military police sumptuousness of the washhouse risking misstatements kept distances iris to iris queen of holes damp, hairy legs note of anger chanting and shouting konk sense of "mold" on the "muff" sense of "talk" on the "surface" konk2 all sorts of chemical girl who delivered the letter give it a bone plummy bare legs saturated in every belief and ignorance rational living private client bad bosom uncertain workmen mutton-tugger obedience to the rules of the logical system Lord Muck hot tears harmonica rascalthat's chaos can you produce chaos? Alice asked certainly I can produce chaos I said I produced chaos she regarded the chaos chaos is handsome and attractive she said and more durable than regret I said and more nourishing than regret she said" ~ Donald Barthelme
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The prices of raw materials do not fluctuate directly with the labour cost of producing them."
Author: Charles E. Wilson

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Thin
Here
Con
Able
Use
Wit
Ten
Hen
Lit
Era
End
Ear
Air
Per
Sit
Sin
Cause
Tend
Hey
Lie
Old
Sing
She
Side
King
Said
Mind
Thou
Self
Win
Rate
Pen
Hole
Son
Father
Fat
Direct
Sign
Tan
Owe
Hair
Mad
May
Less
Across
Word
Yes
Talk
Strange
Whole

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