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And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in 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
Sat
Getting
Love
Drunker

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I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
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Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.
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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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There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.
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I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.
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Is death that which gives meaning to life?
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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 self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
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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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Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
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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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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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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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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.
Donald Barthelme
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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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Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.
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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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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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