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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
Death
Left
Angels
Angel
Strange
Position

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The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.
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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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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.
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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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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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And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
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Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.
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The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
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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.
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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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Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens.
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I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
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Is death that which gives meaning to life?
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I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.
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Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
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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 death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.
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There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.
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Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.
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Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
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