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The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

Donald Barthelme

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Donald Barthelme
Age: 58 †
Born: 1931
Born: April 7
Died: 1989
Died: July 23
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Reporter
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Angels
Angel
Strange
Position
Death
Left

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Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
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Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.
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Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.
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People always like to hear that they're under stress, makes them feel better. You can imagine what they'd feel if they were told they weren't under stress.
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The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.
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Is death that which gives meaning to life?
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Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
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Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
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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.
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There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.
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And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love...And you can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice, or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously.
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Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.
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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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I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.
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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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The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
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Now it is necessary to court her, and win her, and put on this clean dressing gown, and cut my various nails, and drink something that will kill the millions of germs in my mouth, and say something flattering, and be witty and bonny, and hale and kinky, all just to ease this wrinkle in the groin. It seems a high price.
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Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
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Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.
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Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.
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