Top 23 Helen DeWitt Quotes
#1. If you were at school they would not let you read a book like this, they would keep you from reading it by involving you in sport.
Helen DeWitt
#2. [ ... ] and unfortunately most women did not seem to have the same urges. Or if they did, they wouldn't admit it. They probably didn't, anyway. But if they did they wouldn't admit it.
Helen DeWitt
#3. My mother practiced hours every day, hours as painful to hear as to play. At first everybody thought she would give in. Day followed day, and the terrible stumbling sounds went on for hours on end.
She did not know what else to do.
Helen DeWitt
#5. If you don't like a language, you can go write your own.
Helen DeWitt
#6. The master swordsman isn't interested in killing people. He only wants to perfect his art.
Helen DeWitt
#7. Perhaps this is the root of all evil, that gardeners are not put in charge of our schools.
Helen DeWitt
#8. Once he had a foot in the door he explained, "It's not for me to make moral judgments. I'm a businessman. I deal with people as they are, not as they ought to be." "Speaking
Helen DeWitt
#9. He only tells the story once but you see it from about 8 points of view, you have to pay attention the whole time to see whether something seems to be true or is just what somebody says is true.
Helen DeWitt
#10. The writer who is literally an addict, the writer who can't help himself, the writer who HAS to write, can never be anything but an amateur, because the industry requires the professional to put writing on hold not just for a day or two, or a week, but for years.
Helen DeWitt
#11. Yamamoto said he thought you had to be able to hear how something did not work as part of a bigger thing to hear how it did and it was precisely because people couldn't hear that that they were willing to let movements be taken out of pieces.
Helen DeWitt
#12. I felt ashamed, really ashamed of all the years I'd spent trying to identify the father who happened to be mine, instead of simply claiming the best on offer.
Helen DeWitt
#13. WE APPROXIMATE THE BIRD'S BODY BY A SPHERE OF RADIUS 5CM, said Sib, I had no idea aerodynamics was so entertaining
Helen DeWitt
#14. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation ... .Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance, said Sib, was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualities.
Helen DeWitt
#15. On the day of the party I walked down to Covent Garden at lunchtime to buy a dress, and on my way to Boules I thought I would just stop off for a moment at Books etc.
Helen DeWitt
#16. I thought suddenly Look. If Kambei had stopped recruiting when the first samurai didn't work out a 205-minute masterpiece of modern cinema would have been over at minute 32.
Helen DeWitt
#17. When you play a piece of music there are so many different ways you could play it. You keep asking yourself what if. You try this and you say what if and you try that. When you buy a CD you get one answer to the question. You never get the what if.
Helen DeWitt
#18. A brilliant white light beat pitilessly down, like the fierce desert sun at midday on the French Foreign Legion; the glittering floor dazzled the eye with the cruel desert glare. We walked slowly through the cereals.
Helen DeWitt
#19. The reason is that even in a fantasy there is nothing even remotely erotic about a toilet bowl. In fact, considered as an accoutrement to a sexual encounter, a toilet bowl is a real cold shower.
Helen DeWitt
#20. Here was a man who'd learned to write before he could think, a man who threw out logical fallacies like tacks behind a getaway car, and he always always always got away.
Helen DeWitt
#21. He liked I expect the idea of effortless excellence, and being unable to combine the two has settled for the one he could be sure of ...
Helen DeWitt
#22. The typical review makes a Teletubby look like a sabre-toothed tiger. You can economize by reading online rather than squandering $4.95, yes, but all you get is people pusillanimously Favoriting and Liking and Friending. Why is there no Hate button? Why?
Helen DeWitt
#23. I didn't want to go to sleep knowing I would just wake up in the morning.
Helen DeWitt
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