Quote

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.

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
Love
Perfume
Signs
Charm
Wife
Beauty
Found
Cookery
Made
Softness
Believe
Obtained

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Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
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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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Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
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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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Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
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Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.
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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.
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I am never needlessly obscure - I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.
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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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Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.
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Write about what you're afraid of.
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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 self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
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Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.
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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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The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.
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The death of God left the angels in a strange position.
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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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Now, here is the point about the self: it is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuff full.
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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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