Top 30 Thomas M. Disch Quotes
#1. (Shoddiness is) the nature of human life. It takes an exertion to be indifferent to these things, but it's an exertion worth making. Also, it allows you luxuries like scorn and flippancy.
Thomas M. Disch
#2. Here was a flower (the daisy reflected) strangely like itself and yet utterly unlike itself too. Such a paradox has often been the basis for the most impassioned love.
Thomas M. Disch
#3. Creativity is the ability to see relationships where none exist.
Thomas M. Disch
#4. Poets are regarded as handicapped writers whose work must be treated with a tender condescension, such as one accords the athletic achievements of basketball players confined to wheelchairs.
Thomas M. Disch
#6. All children ... feel a demonic sympathy with those things that cause disorder in the grown-up world.
Thomas M. Disch
#7. A predilection for genre fiction is symptomatic of a kind of arrested development.
Thomas M. Disch
#8. The toaster (lacking real bread) would pretend to make two crispy slices of toast. Or, if the day seemed special in some way, it would toast an imaginary English muffin.
Thomas M. Disch
#9. For a lot of people, poetry tends to be dull. It's not read much. It takes a special kind of training and a lot of practice to read poetry with pleasure. It's like learning to like asparagus.
Thomas M. Disch
#10. Writers tend to consider distinction and originality as virtues, but they are anathema to publishers.
Thomas M. Disch
#11. The distances between the stars seem brief by contrast to the distances between each of us and his fellows.
Thomas M. Disch
#12. The problem is that we've got a sense of humor and (Republicans have) got guns. Will we die laughing?
Thomas M. Disch
#13. In any case, muffins that are only imaginary aren't liable to get stuck.
Thomas M. Disch
#14. Gene Wolfe has produced a work of art that can satisfy adult appetites and in which even the most fantastical elements register as poetry rather than as penny-whistle whimsy.
Thomas M. Disch
#16. It considered trying to explain their error to them, but what would be the use? They would only go away with hurt feelings. You can't always expect people, or squirrels, to be rational.
Thomas M. Disch
#18. Knowledge is devalued when it becomes too generally known
Thomas M. Disch
#19. When one is experiencing failure, it is hard to resist the comfort of paranoia.
Thomas M. Disch
#20. America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe.
Thomas M. Disch
#21. Though opposition is a hopeless task, acquiescence would be worse.
Thomas M. Disch
#23. Gender and the complications it gives rise to simply aren't relevant to the lives appliances lead.
Thomas M. Disch
#24. The end of the world. Let me tell you about the end of the world. It happened fifty years ago. Maybe a hundred. And since then it's been lovely. I mean it. Nobody tries to bother you. You can relax. You know what? I like the end of the world.
Thomas M. Disch
#25. Thought is a disease of the brain. The mind defends itself against the degenerative process of creativity; it begins to jell; notions solidify into inalterable systems.
Thomas M. Disch
#26. Much that is terrible we do not know. Much that is beautiful we shall still discover. Let's sail till we come to the edge.
Thomas M. Disch
#27. This is my journal. I can be candid here. Candidly, I could not be more miserable.
Thomas M. Disch
#29. The gods, after all, are only human, and once their rage has been placated they are perfectly capable of acts of mercy and grace.
Thomas M. Disch
#30. So, without saying anything to the others, it made its way to the farthest corner of the meadow and began to toast an imaginary muffin. That was always the best way to unwind when things got to be too much for it.
Thomas M. Disch
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