Quote

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

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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
Men
Easier
Example
Attainment
Goal
Incapable
Look
Goals
Looks
Driven
Need
Despair
Many
Merely
Needs
Window

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Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
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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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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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The death of God left the angels in a strange position.
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And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
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The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.
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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? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.
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Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
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I don't believe that we are what we do although many thinkers argue otherwise. I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are -- an imperfect manifestation of a much better totality. Even the best of us sometimes bite off, as it were, less than we can chew.
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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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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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Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
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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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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.
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I am never needlessly obscure - I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.
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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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Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don't count?
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Write about what you're afraid of.
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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