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Top Nicholson Baker Quotes

Browse top 58 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Nicholson Baker.

Favorite Nicholson Baker Quotes

1. "You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem." ~ Nicholson Baker
2. "There is no good word for stomach; just as there is no good word for girlfriend. Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is to petite amie." ~ Nicholson Baker
3. "Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why." ~ Nicholson Baker
4. "The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well--the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction." ~ Nicholson Baker
5. "Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped wood fiber." ~ Nicholson Baker
6. "A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside." ~ Nicholson Baker
7. "So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme." ~ Nicholson Baker
8. "...no animal likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck." ~ Nicholson Baker
9. "I made an egg salad sandwich and took a bite of it over the open silverware drawer. A piece of egg salad fell in among the forks. I swore softly with my mouth full. Another piece of egg salad fell in." ~ Nicholson Baker
10. "Notes of joy have a special STP solvent in them that dissolves all the gluey engine deposits of heartache. War and woe don't have anything like the range and reach that notes of joy do." ~ Nicholson Baker
11. "The fact that we had independently decided to sweep our apartments on that Sunday afternoon after spending the weekend together, I took as a strong piece of evidence that we were right for each other. And from then on when I read things Samuel Johnson said about the deadliness of leisure and the uplifting effects of industry, I always nodded and thought of brooms." ~ Nicholson Baker
12. "One French guy at a bar wanted several of us to "faire le parachutisme." He said it was easy, you just jumped out of a plane. It sounded very exciting but no, thank you. He said "I'm not a homo." I said it's not a question of whether or not you're a homo, I just don't want to jump out of a plane." ~ Nicholson Baker
13. "You've got to get cold to get warm," Phoebe said.Now that is the truth. That is so true about so many things. You learn it first with sheets and blankets: that the initial touch of the smooth sheets will send you shivering, but their warming works fast, and you must experience the discomfort to find the later contentment. It's true with money and love, too. You've got to save to have something to spend. Think of how hard it is to ask out a person you like. In my case, Claire asked me to go on a date to the cash machine, so I didn't actually have to ask her. Still, her lips were cold, but her tongue was warm." ~ Nicholson Baker
14. "All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are gong to come tumbling out before you. I'm going to divulge them. What a juicy work that is, 'divulge.' Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat." ~ Nicholson Baker
15. "There is a feeble urgency behind all forced mannerisms of finery- haste and pomp cannot coincide." ~ Nicholson Baker
16. "In 1855, as the price of paper rose, Dr. Deck proposed to dig up 2 1/2 million tons of Egyptian mummies, ship them to New York, unroll them; and use their linen wrappings to make paper." ~ Nicholson Baker
17. "Anyway, she sings like a mad tropical bird, and it's just a fondue of molten wanting and grieving and the sadness of the large naked swinging breasts and soft olive skin and everything that you wish you could remember and feel and know." ~ Nicholson Baker
18. "And then there is, of course, always, and inevitably, this spume of poetry that's just blowing out of the sulphurous flue-holes of the earth. Just masses of poetry. It's unstoppable, it's uncorkable. There's no way to make it end." ~ Nicholson Baker
19. "Who cares about my cock? It'll fend for itself." ~ Nicholson Baker
20. "Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for." ~ Nicholson Baker
21. "Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast." ~ Nicholson Baker
22. "Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?" ~ Nicholson Baker
23. "I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels." ~ Nicholson Baker
24. "Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master." ~ Nicholson Baker
25. "Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you've watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you." ~ Nicholson Baker
26. "First, if you love the Kindle and it works for you, it isn't problematic, and you should ignore all my criticisms and read the way you want to read." ~ Nicholson Baker
27. "For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo." ~ Nicholson Baker
28. "The music wasn't going to happen, and I realized I had read so little. I didn't know my way around any century. I was very under read." ~ Nicholson Baker
29. "You can register a political objection in a number of ways." ~ Nicholson Baker
30. "E.B. White's essays are the best things I've read about Maine - especially the one in which he's not sure if he can go out sailing any more in his sloop." ~ Nicholson Baker
31. "Will you dance for me? Let your breasts roam for a moment -- I need to see how they dance.''Okay.' She danced, and as she danced, she tried to think of the most delicious salads she could imagine -- with artichokes and sundried tomato and blue cheese dressing, and beets, lots of beets." ~ Nicholson Baker
32. "But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It's a mistake of emphasis." ~ Nicholson Baker
33. "Poetry is prose in slow motion." ~ Nicholson Baker
34. "When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry." ~ Nicholson Baker
35. "While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read." ~ Nicholson Baker
36. "Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism." ~ Nicholson Baker
37. "I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow." ~ Nicholson Baker
38. "I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes." ~ Nicholson Baker
39. "I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing." ~ Nicholson Baker
40. "Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays." ~ Nicholson Baker
41. "Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants." ~ Nicholson Baker
42. "So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry." ~ Nicholson Baker
43. "That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before." ~ Nicholson Baker
44. "And I'll flip through the newest issue, walking back from my blue mailbox, hunting for the poem he chose over mine, and it'll be the same thing as always. The prose will have pulled back, and the poem will be there, cavorting, saying, I'm a poem, I'm a poem. No, you're not! You're an impostor, you're a toy train of pretend stanzas of chopped garbage. Just like my poem was." ~ Nicholson Baker
45. "The Pop-Tarts page is often aflutter. Pop-Tarts, it says as of today (February 8, 2008), were discontinued in Australia in 2005. Maybe that's true. Before that it said that Pop-Tarts were discontinued in Korea. Before that Australia. Several days ago it said: "Pop-Tarts is german for Little Iced Pastry O' Germany." Other things I learned from earlier versions: More than two trillion Pop-Tarts are sold each year. George Washington invented them. They were developed in the early 1960s in China. Popular flavors are "frosted strawberry, frosted brown sugar cinnamon, and semen." Pop-Tarts are a "flat Cookie." No: "Pop-Tarts are a flat Pastry, KEVIN MCCORMICK is a FRIGGIN LOSER notto mention a queer inch." No: "A Pop-Tart is a flat condom." Once last fall the whole page was replaced with "NIPPLES AND BROCCOLI!!!!!" ~ Nicholson Baker
46. "…you almost believe that you will never come to the end of a roll of tape; and when you do, there is a feeling, nearly, though very briefly, of shock and grief." ~ Nicholson Baker
47. "Gerard Manley Hopkins somewhere describes how he mesmerized a duck by drawing a line of chalk out in front of it. Think of me as the duck; the chalk, softly wearing itself away against the tiny pebbles embedded in the corporate concrete, is Joyce's forward-luring rough-smooth voice on the cassettes she gives me. Or, to substitute another image, since one is hardly sufficient in Joyce's case, when I let myself really enter her tape, when I let it surround me, it is as if I'm sunk into the pond of what she is saying, as if I'm some kind of patient, cruising amphibian, drifting in black water, entirely submerged except for my eyes, which blink every so often. Each word comes floating up to me like a thick, healthy lily pad and brushes past my head." ~ Nicholson Baker
48. "The two plants had a gentleman's agreement going, like the railroad companies and the real-estate speculators in the old days, whereby they progressed together up the hill and into the yard." ~ Nicholson Baker
49. "Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who bought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities -- their brute persistence." ~ Nicholson Baker
50. "I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read." ~ Nicholson Baker
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Today's Quote

When I fall in love, it will be for always. Nothing will change that. No one will walk out. We will stay together forever, and when death finally separates us we will have the memories that we shared. He will be that kind of person. I will know him instantly when I finally meet him. And he will love me forever."
Author: Barbara Conklin

What Did Nicholson Baker Talk About?

Thin
End
Wit
Hen
Here
Ear
Con
Read
King
She
Ally
Pen
Hey
Per
Lit
Ten
Act
Each
Ape
Low
Poet
Era
Ways
Use
Sit
Thou
Win
Though
Sin
Sing
Wing
Said
Round
Air
Hole
Chin
Bee
Able
Cause
Ring
Roll
Once
Fact
Spend
Away
Thinking
Sun
Rate
Paper
Old

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