Quote

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.

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
Always
Call
Hankering
Never
Point
Flaming
World
Stuff
Insatiable
Might
Fault
Self
Mouth
Great
Faults
Thing
Mouths
Going
Full
Rapacious

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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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The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.
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Is death that which gives meaning to life?
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And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
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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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Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.
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Write about what you're afraid of.
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The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
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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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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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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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Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
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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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Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.
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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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I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
Donald Barthelme
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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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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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