Quote

Will you be wanting to contest the divorce? I asked Mrs. Davis. I should think not, she said calmly, although I suppose on of us should, for the fun of the thing. An uncontested divorce always seems to me contrary to the spirit of divorce.

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
Fun
Contest
Spirit
Contests
Seems
Divorce
Thing
Wanting
Always
Suppose
Think
Contrary
Uncontested
Thinking
Although
Calmly
Asked
Davis

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There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.
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I am never needlessly obscure - I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.
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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 think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
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The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
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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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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 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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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 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 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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Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
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Is death that which gives meaning to life?
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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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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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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 aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.
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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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Write about what you're afraid of.
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