David Lodge quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by David Lodge

Top David Lodge Quotes

Browse top 30 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by David Lodge.

Favorite David Lodge Quotes

1. "Jogging, I believe they call it. It seems to be an epidemic psychological illness afflicting Americans these days. A form of masochism, like the flagellantes in the Middle Ages." ~ David Lodge

2. "I mean, mentally you brace yourself for the ending of a novel. As you're reading, you're aware of the fact that there's only a page or two left in the book, and you get ready to close it. but with a film there's no way of telling, especially nowadays, when films are much more loosely structured, much more ambivalent, than they used to be. There's no way of telling which frame is going to be the last. The film is going along, just as life goes along, people are behaving, doing things, drinking, talking, and we're watching them, and at any point the director chooses, without warning, without anything being resolved, or explained, or wound up, it can just...end." ~ David Lodge

3. "So they stood upon the shores of Faith and felt the old dogmas and certainties ebbing away rapidly under their feet and between their toes, sapping the foundations upon which they stood, a sensation both agreeably stilmulating and sightly unnerving" ~ David Lodge

4. "Our friends started life with too many beliefs -- the penalty of a Catholic upbringing. They were weighted down with beliefs, useless answers to non-questions. to work their way back to the fundamental ones -- what can we know? why is there anything at all? why not nothing? what may we hope? why are we here? what is it all about? -- they had to dismantle all that apparatus of superfluous belief and discard it piece by piece. But in matters of belief...it is nice question how far you can go in this process without throwing out something vital." ~ David Lodge

5. "but the creative juices dry up if they're not kept in circulation." ~ David Lodge

6. "When does a novel begin? The question is almost as difficult to answer as the question, when does the human embryo become a person?" ~ David Lodge

7. "It is, as I say, easy enough to describe Holden's style of narration; but more difficult to explain how it holds our attention and gives us pleasure for the length of a whole novel. For, make no mistake, it's the style that makes the book interesting. The story it tells is episodic, inconclusive and largely made up of trivial events. Yet the language is, by normal literary criteria, very impoverished. Salinger, the invisible ventriloquist who speaks to us through Holden, must say everything he has to say about life and death and ultimate values within the limitations of a seventeen-year-old New Yorker's argot, eschewing poetic metaphors, periodic cadences, fine writing of any kind." ~ David Lodge

8. "The choice of the point(s) of view from which the story is told is arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions. The story of an adultery, for instance - any adultery - will affect us differently according to whether it is presented primarily from the point of view of the unfaithful person, or the injured spouse, or the lover - or as observed by some fourth party. Madame Bovary narrated mainly from the point of view of Charles Bovary would be a very different book from the one we know." ~ David Lodge

9. "In fiction, especially in texts that are framed by a storytelling situation, aporia is a favourite device of narrators to arouse curiosity in their audience, or to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the story they are telling. It is often combined with another figure of rhetoric, "aposiopesis", the incomplete sentence or unfinished utterance, usually indicated on the page by a trail of dots..." ~ David Lodge

10. "Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary." ~ David Lodge

11. "Niciodata n-am visat mult. Ceea ce inseamna din cate inteleg ca pur si simplu nu-mi amintesc visele, fiindca de visat visam tot timpul cat dormim sau cel putin asa se spune. E ca si cum as avea un televizor la care nu se uita nimeni si care imi palpaie in cap cat e noaptea de lunga. Canalul viselor. As vrea sa pot sa trag toata chestia asta pe video. Poate ca atunci mi-as da cat de cat seama ce se intampla cu mine. Si nu ma refer la genunchi, ci la cap. La minte. La suflet." ~ David Lodge

12. "Cica in fiecare grasan se afla cate-un slabanog care se lupta sa iasa la lumina, iar eu unul ii aud strigatele inabusite ori de cate ori ma uit in oglinda." ~ David Lodge

13. "wandering between two worlds, one lost, the other powerless to be born." ~ David Lodge

14. "Intensity of experience is what we're looking for, I think. We know we won't find it at home any more, but there's always the hope that we'll find it abroad" ~ David Lodge

15. "...my big depression. For six months I languished at the bottom of a deep hole, like the shaft of a waterless well, while kindly, puzzled people...peered down at me over the rim of the parapet and tried to cheer me up, or lowered drugs and advice in a bucket." ~ David Lodge

16. "What are we all looking for? Happiness? One knows that doesn't last. Distraction, perhaps distraction from the ugly facts: that there is death, there is disease, there is impotence and senility ahead" ~ David Lodge

17. "J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield is a literary descendant of Huck Finn: more educated and sophisticated, the son of affluent New Yorkers, but like Huck a youthful runaway from a world of adult hypocrisy, venality and, to use one of his own favourite words, phoniness. What particularly appals Holden is the eagerness of his peers to adopt that corrupt grownup behaviour." ~ David Lodge

18. "He hugs the thought to himself with guilty glee." ~ David Lodge

19. "What was left was sex in the head, as D.H.Lawrence called it. ... Where else would the human subject have sex but in the head? Sexual desire was a play of signifiers, an infinite determent and displacement of anticipated pleasure which the brute coupling of the signifieds temporarily interrupted." ~ David Lodge

20. "perhaps it will I said perhaps it will be wonderful perhaps even though it won't be like you think perhaps that won't matter perhaps" ~ David Lodge

21. "He is well satisfied with his accommodation, which provides all modern amenities in a compact and convenient form, and leaves him the maximum amount of time free for his work. How much time people waste in walking from one room to another.... Space is time." ~ David Lodge

22. "We're a bundle of incompatible parts, and we make up stories about ourselves to disguise the fact. The mental unity of the individual is a fiction. There is simply, in the human machine, a multitude of loosely linked behaviour systems which take control of the body and participate in a common delusion of being one single self" ~ David Lodge

23. "Every decoding is another encoding." ~ David Lodge

24. "For some days, now, the termperature had wavered between freezing and thawing and it was difficult to tell whether the sediment thickening the atmostphere was rain or sleet or smog. Through the murk the dull red eye of a sun that had scarcely been able to drag itself above roof level all day was sinking blearily beneath the horizon, spreading a rusty stain across the snow-covered surfaces. Read pathetic fallacy weather." ~ David Lodge

25. "I could never feel like that about any public issue. Sometimes I wish I could. For me, if I'm honest, politics is background, news, almost entertainment. Something you switch on and off, like the TV. What I really worry about, what I can't switch off at will is, oh, sex, or dying or losing my hair. Private things. We're private people, aren't we, our generation? We make a clear distinction between private and public life; and the important things, the things that make us happy or unhappy are private. Live is private. Property is private. Parts are private. That's why the young radicals call for fucking in the streets. It's not just a cheap shock-tactic. It's a serious revolutionary proposition." ~ David Lodge

26. "to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing" ~ David Lodge

27. "It's a special form of scholarly neurosis,´ said Camel. `He's no longer able to distinguish between life and literature.´" ~ David Lodge

28. "Perhaps that's what we're all looking for - desire undiluted by habit." ~ David Lodge

29. "It's the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces" ~ David Lodge

30. "Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards." ~ David Lodge

David Lodge Quotes Pictures

David Lodge Quotes

David Lodge Quotes

David Lodge Quotes

<< Brent Weeks Quotes

Emme Rollins Quotes >>

Today's Quote

I kissed my fingers,held my palm flat beside my mouth and blew it into the air that surrounded her memory. I closed my eyes, thinking this was one of those moments you see in movies or read about in books where everything comes together."
Author: Belinda Jeffrey

What Did David Lodge Talk About?

Famous Authors

Maria Semenova Quotes (1 sayings)
Marion Berry Quotes (8 sayings)
James MacGregor Burns Quotes (4 sayings)
Susan Spann Quotes (1 sayings)
Maryam DAbo Quotes (5 sayings)
Sam Palladio Quotes (4 sayings)
Al Walser Quotes (3 sayings)
Tim Holmes Quotes (1 sayings)
Francis Frangipane Quotes (1 sayings)
Wolfgang Pauli Quotes (3 sayings)

Popular Topics