Top 100 Barthelme Quotes
#1. The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.
George Saunders
#2. And Harold came into Perpetua's apartment.
He said, 'I just want to know one thing. Are you happy?' 'Sure,' Perpetua said. (Donald Barthelme, "Perpetua")
Donald Barthelme
#3. I've learned so much from my professors and have been fortunate to have had so many good ones, including Frederick and Steven Barthelme, Edward Carey, Jim Magnuson, and Elizabeth McCracken.
Mary J. Miller
#4. I met Donald Barthelme when I was 30, and it's fair to say that before that moment, I was pre-modern, and after I met him, I was nudged rather forcefully towards this other end of the spectrum.
Padgett Powell
#5. The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.
Zadie Smith
#6. I don't think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and reviews, and it's enacted in his fiction in a mishmash of dizzying incongruities.
Joanna Scott
#7. I love those adult writers with the pranking ethos, [Don] DeLillo and [Donald] Barthelme and David Foster Wallace. I don't see any reason not to bring those kinds of influences to bear on books for children.
Mac Barnett
#8. Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.
Padgett Powell
#9. 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
#10. How does one conquer fear, Don B.?" "One takes a frog and sews it to one's shoe," he said. "The left or the right?" Don B. gave me a pitying look. "Well, you'd look mighty funny going down the street with only one frog sewed to your shoes, wouldn't you?" he said. "One frog on each shoe.
Donald Barthelme
#12. The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do ... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.
Donald Barthelme
#14. You get Kandinsky, a bad mother, all them pick-up-sticks pictures ...
Donald Barthelme
#15. But if someone had slowed him down, just slightly interrupted his course, maybe he could have gotten through that one nightmarish moment; maybe he would never get that close to it again.
Frederick Barthelme
#16. You came and fell upon me, I was sitting in the wicker chair. The wicker exclaimed as your weight fell upon me. You were light, I thought, and I thought how good it was of you to do this. We'd never touched before.
Donald Barthelme
#17. All of us ... still believe that the American flag betokens a kind of general righteousness. But I say ... that signs are signs and some of them are lies.
Donald Barthelme
#18. 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.
Donald Barthelme
#19. Some people', Miss R. said,'run to conceits or wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool.
Donald Barthelme
#20. Of course we did everything right, insofar as we were able to imagine what "right" was.
Donald Barthelme
#21. The daughters are tired of kissing each other, although some are not.
Donald Barthelme
#22. Take me home," Snow White said. "Take me home instantly. If there is anything worse than being home, it is being out.
Donald Barthelme
#23. Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.
Donald Barthelme
#24. 97. I approached the symbol, with its layers of meaning, but when I touched it, it changed into only a beautiful princess.
98. I threw the beautiful princess headfirst down the mountain to my acquaintances.
99. Who could be relied upon to deal with her.
Donald Barthelme
#25. Pia was chopping up an enormous cabbage, a cabbage big as a basketball. The cabbage was of an extraordinary size. It was a big cabbage. "That's a big cabbage," Edward said. "Big," Pia said.
Donald Barthelme
#26. They were heading I judged for the Sixth Precinct. Had I had the black hat with me, and sufficient men and horses and lariats and .30-30s, and popular support from the masses and a workable revolutionary ideology and/or a viable myth pattern, I would have rescued them.
Donald Barthelme
#27. 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.
Donald Barthelme
#28. Can the life of the time be caught in an advertisement? Is that how it is, really, in the meadows of the world?
Donald Barthelme
#29. I sit down on the curb, outside the Opera. People passing look at me. I will wait here for a hundred years. Or until the hot meat of romance is cooled by the dull gravy of common sense once more
Donald Barthelme
#30. There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.
Donald Barthelme
#31. She said things and I nodded. I didn't pay attention. She didn't pay attention to me. We floated through our days in that way.
Frederick Barthelme
#32. Art is a meditation upon external reality rather than a representation of external reality
Donald Barthelme
#33. Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.
Donald Barthelme
#34. 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.
Donald Barthelme
#35. A hundred canes shattered in the sun, like a load of antihistamines falling out of an airplane.
Donald Barthelme
#37. Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole.
Donald Barthelme
#38. There is a feeling of disbelief that comes over you, that takes over, and you kind of go through the motions. You do what you're supposed to do, but in fact you're not there at all.
Frederick Barthelme
#39. Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.
Donald Barthelme
#40. And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
Donald Barthelme
#41. How can you be alienated without first having been connected?
Donald Barthelme
#42. One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.
Donald Barthelme
#43. The thing about books is, there are quite a number you don't have to read.
Donald Barthelme
#44. The writer is one who, emnbarking upon a task, does not know what to do.
Donald Barthelme
#45. 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.
Donald Barthelme
#46. Capitalism places every man in competition with his fellows for a share of the available wealth. A few people accumulate big piles, but most do not. The sense of community falls victim to this struggle.
Donald Barthelme
#47. Your father and I were in the trenches together, in the Great War. That was a war all right. Oh I know there have been other wars since, better-publisized ones, more expensive ones perhaps, but our war is the one I'll always remember. Our war is the one that means war to me.
Donald Barthelme
#48. Like most marriages, ours eventually wore down all the cartilage. We were a hip needing replacement. Bone on bone, grinding, day in and day out. It worked but it was hard.
Frederick Barthelme
#49. Meg Pokrass writes like a brain looking for a body. Wonderful, dark, unforgiving.
Frederick Barthelme
#50. A process of accretion. Barnacles growing on a wreck or a rock. I'd rather have a wreck than a ship that sails. Things attach themselves to wrecks. Strange fish find your wreck or rock to be a good feeding ground; after a while you've got a situation with possibilities.
Donald Barthelme
#51. 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.
Donald Barthelme
#53. MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.
Donald Barthelme
#54. [picket sign] COGITO ERGO NOTHING! ... [casual passerby:] "Cogito ergo your ass" ...
Donald Barthelme
#55. No man's plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of God's will.
Donald Barthelme
#56. It is possible of course that there are no more real men here, on his ball of half-truths, the earth.
Donald Barthelme
#57. Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught - prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
Donald Barthelme
#58. I remember loving pencils. I was fond of paper. I loved the small of textbooks. I loved the way the light from a desk lamp was bright on a page. I loved the smell of fresh-cut grass. It was a thing everybody loved, but there was no shame in being that much like everybody else, in sharing that.
Frederick Barthelme
#59. We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.
Donald Barthelme
#60. Glimpses is dead-on about the high and tight nineties even as it reaches out for the sweet hereafter of the sixties. It longs for something better, and finds it, I guess, as much as anything is ever found anymore. It's a mean, sweet, wry, and disturbing book, in equal portions.
Frederick Barthelme
#61. I am never needlessly obscure I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.
Donald Barthelme
#62. Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.
Donald Barthelme
#63. The mind carries you with it, away from what you are supposed to do, toward things that cannot be explained rationally, toward difficulty, lack of clarity, late-afternoon light.
Donald Barthelme
#64. I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
Donald Barthelme
#65. Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
Donald Barthelme
#66. The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.
Donald Barthelme
#67. All men that are ruined are ruined on the side of their natural propensities, the note concludes.
This is surely true. Yet the vivacity with which he embraces ruin is unexampled, in my experience.
Donald Barthelme
#68. But we little know until tried how much of the uncontrollable there is in us, urging across glaciers and torrents, and up dangerous heights, let the judgement forbid as it may.
Donald Barthelme
#69. How old are you Hogo." "Thirty-five Jane. A not unpleasant age to be." "You don't mind then. That you are not young." "It has its buggy aspects as what does not?" "You don't mind then that you are sagging in the direction of death." "No, Jane.
Donald Barthelme
#70. The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page.
Donald Barthelme
#71. There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the "meaning" of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.
Donald Barthelme
#72. Truth, as Bergson knew, is a hard apple, whether one is throwing it or catching it.
Donald Barthelme
#73. Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
Donald Barthelme
#74. Immature citizens in several sizes were massed before a large factorylike structure where advanced techniques transformed them into true-thinking right-acting members of the three social classes, lower, middle, and upper middle.
Donald Barthelme
#75. The first thing I did was make a mistake. I thought I had understood capitalism, but what I had done was assume an attitude -melancholy sadness- toward it.
Donald Barthelme
#76. The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day ...
Donald Barthelme
#77. 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
#78. The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.
Donald Barthelme
#79. The trouble with capturing one is that that original gesture is almost impossible to equal or improve upon.
Donald Barthelme
#80. Little is known about her. We are assured, however, that the same damnable involvements that obsess us obsess her too. Copulation. Strangeness. Applause.
Donald Barthelme
#81. -You are killing me."
" -We? Not we. Not in any sense, we. Processes are killing you, not we. Inexorable processes.
Donald Barthelme
#82. The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.
Donald Barthelme
#83. 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.
Donald Barthelme
#85. Let me point out, if it has escaped your notice, that what an artist does, is fail.
Donald Barthelme
#87. Dun-colored fathers tend to shy at obstacles, and therefore you do not want a father of this color, because life, in one sense, is nothing but obstacles, and his continual shying will reduce your nerves to grease.
Donald Barthelme
#88. It seemed to proclaim itself a mystery, but one there was no point in solving - an ongoing low-grade mystery.
Donald Barthelme
#89. Fathers are teachers of the true and not-true, and no father ever knowingly teaches what is not true. In a cloud of unknowing, then, the father proceeds with his instruction.
Donald Barthelme
#90. It is difficult to keep the public interested. The public demands new wonders piled on new wonders. Often we don't know where our next marvel is coming from. The supply of strange ideas is not endless.
Donald Barthelme
#91. We regarded each other sitting around the breakfast table with its big cardboard boxes of "Fear," "Chix," and "Rats.
Donald Barthelme
#92. The world is sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, stalling, shrinking, and in dynamic unbalance.
Donald Barthelme
#93. I lay on the bed and shut my eyes, thinking that nobody really likes marriage, that it's a flawed arrangement, that people get enthusiastic and jump in for a hundred reasons and then, after the ceremony, after a few years, the whole deal turns into a concert they wouldn't have dreamed of attending.
Frederick Barthelme
#94. Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
Donald Barthelme
#96. The important thing is the educational experience itself - how to survive it.
Donald Barthelme
#97. Anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world.
Donald Barthelme
#98. And eloquence, Henry Mackie says, is really all any of us can hope for.
Donald Barthelme
#99. This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multi-directional and has a mayor.
Donald Barthelme
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