Top 100 Gaddis Quotes
#1. The difference was that Flossie Gaddis was starved about men and Sissy was healthily hungry about them. And what a difference that made.
Betty Smith
#2. Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest. William Gaddis, The Recognitions.
William Gaddis
#3. Nathan "N.R." Gaddis did not say ::
2109 fellow Goodreaders [can't be wrong] gave [King Lear] 1 star. Many call it boring. Some even say it is predictable and has no moral lesson. That these people have the right to vote and to procreate is frightening to me.
Nathan "N.R." Gaddis
#4. Historians must not confuse the passage of time with the accumulation of intelligence," John Lewis Gaddis has cautioned.
Douglas Boin
#5. From what I saw the plurality of students and faculty had been educated exclusively in the tradition of writers like William Gaddis ...
Junot Diaz
#6. John Lewis Gaddis had come to visit shortly before the election and over lunch said something that resonated with me. "Never forget how really dependent the world is on America. And they know it.
Condoleezza Rice
#7. We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.
- William H. Gass, "Mr. Gaddis and His Goddamn Books" (2006)
William H Gass
#8. John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.
Noam Chomsky
#9. As the American historian John Lewis Gaddis put it, it is like looking in a rearview mirror: if you only look back, you will land in the ditch, but it helps to know where you have come from and who else is on the road.
Margaret MacMillan
#10. I also believe I met William Gaddis once. He did not look Italian.
David Markson
#11. December 29, 1946: Snowing this morning. The year seems to be dying in a light white blanket. Only three more days of this year, then comes a new one. Then, what? No one knows.
Diary of Bertha Kate Gaddis who passed away 6 months later, age 78, West Lafayette, IN.
Angie Klink
#12. Power does not corrupt people, people corrupt people.
William Gaddis
#13. Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion.
Gaddis Smith
#14. Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.
William Gaddis
#15. Get a black suit and just freeload, problem it's too God damned late now even to be any of the things I never wanted to be.
William Gaddis
#16. Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of ... recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it ...
William Gaddis
#17. It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.
William Gaddis
#18. The dirty Arab children sold peanuts from the top of the basket and hashish from the bottom. They spoke a masterful unintimidated French in guttural gasps, coming from a land where it was regarded neither as the most beautiful language, as in America, nor the only one, as in France.
William Gaddis
#19. Let them look up in the sky then ... ! if they must be so blind, that cannot see the truth in broad daylight, but must have the whole world in darkness to see the conceit of the stars ...
William Gaddis
#20. How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible ...
William Gaddis
#21. I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which 'The Recognitions' ' debt to 'Ulysses' was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read 'Ulysses.
William Gaddis
#22. If you want to make a million you don't have to understand money, what you have to understand is people's fears about money
William Gaddis
#23. There was the cell where Fr. Eulalio, a thriving lunatic of eighty-six who was castigating himself for unchristian pride at having all the vowels in his name, and greatly revered for his continuous weeping, went blind in an ecstasy of such howling proportions that his canonization was assured.
William Gaddis
#24. If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.
William Gaddis
#25. She can paint herself red and hang on the wall and whistle, I don't care
William Gaddis
#26. - What shall I do, in a Purgatory?... where they all speak spanish? I've never been in any kind of Purgatory before, and no one(...)
William Gaddis
#27. Mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.
William Gaddis
#28. The function of this school is custodial. It's here to keep these kids off the streets until the girls are big enough to get pregnant and the boys are old enough to go out and hold up a gas station.
William Gaddis
#29. - I really prefer books. No matter how bad a book is, it's unique, but people are all so ordinary.
- I think we really like books that make us hate ourselves.
William Gaddis
#30. The United States came out of the 1990s, if anything, in an even greater position of hegemony and preeminence than it was at the beginning of the 1990s.
John Lewis Gaddis
#31. The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.
William Gaddis
#32. He took off his hat and shook it (having hurried home as though his own coronation were waiting), and moved now with the slow deliberation of lonely people who have time for every meager requirement of their lives.
William Gaddis
#33. I don't think there is necessarily a contradiction between being a hegemonic power on the one hand and functioning multilaterally on the other.
John Lewis Gaddis
#34. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises.
William Gaddis
#35. The sign of a good novel is what it can cause its reader to see, even if this lies beyond the author's own vision.
John Gaddis
#36. Fragments of a conversation she had left a little earlier (on Rilke, not Rilke's poetry but Rilke the man, who refused to be psychoanalyzed for fear of purging his genius);
William Gaddis
#37. Holy things and holy places, out of mind under the cauterizing brilliance of the summer son, reared up now as the winter sun struck from the south, casting shadows coldly upon the avenues where the people followed and went in, wearing winter hearts on their sleeves for the plucking.
William Gaddis
#39. I think the way to think about the impact of Hiroshima is to think about it as a sudden shift in the balance of power.
John Lewis Gaddis
#41. All we've got left to protect here is a system that's set up to promote the meanest possibilities in human nature and make them look good.
William Gaddis
#42. We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.
William Gaddis
#43. Stalin's postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order.
John Lewis Gaddis
#44. Justice?
You get justice in the next world. In this one you have the law.
William Gaddis
#45. George W. Bush has much to evaluate: he has presided over the most sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
John Lewis Gaddis
#46. ...the face of Christ in your van der Goes, no one could call that a lie.
William Gaddis
#47. Are a good thing for America, they help keep the homosexuals off the streets.
William Gaddis
#50. Even in sleep, he was waiting, a little tense like everyone waiting within reach of a telephone, for it to ring. And still, even in sleep, he knew there would be time. Adam, after all, lived for nine hundred thirty years.
William Gaddis
#51. That fever had passed; but for the rest of his life it never left his eyes.
William Gaddis
#52. There's much more stupidity than there is malice in the world ...
William Gaddis
#53. Love paid a price so hope could become a reality.
Susan Gaddis
#54. We've had the goddam Ages of Faith, we've had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity
William Gaddis
#55. Women get desperate, but they don't understand despair.
William Gaddis
#56. I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.
William Gaddis
#57. ...he chose, not the disquieting road to serenity, but the serenely narrow path to eventual and total derangement.
William Gaddis
#58. Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village.
William Gaddis
#59. And there were no signs whatever of the disagreements among capitalists - or of the Anglo-American war - that Stalin's ideological illusions had led him to expect.
John Lewis Gaddis
#60. President Carter inherited an impossible situation
and he and his advisers made the worst of it.
Gaddis Smith
#61. What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?
William Gaddis
#62. What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.
William Gaddis
#63. If there is one great power, and the great power has taken upon itself the right to preempt and is choosing for itself when and in what circumstances it's going to do that, obviously it leads people in the rest of the world to wonder how far this doctrine extends.
John Lewis Gaddis
#65. I, it's just, listen, criticism? It's the most important art now, it's the one we need most now. Criticism is the art we need most today. But not, don't you see? not the "if I'd done it myself . . ." Yes, a, a disciplined nostalgia, disciplined recognitions
William Gaddis
#66. Follow your own path, and you'll get lost. Follow His, and you won't.
Susan Gaddis
#67. That after an hour's silence he can say, The one thing I cannot stand is dampness ... That's all, it took him an hour to work that out.
William Gaddis
#68. Choose your own attitude. Don't let another choose it for you.
Susan Gaddis
#69. Second terms in the White House open the way for second thoughts.
John Lewis Gaddis
#70. It is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one's exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy.
William Gaddis
#71. Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?
William Gaddis
#73. Where would Christianity be today if Jesus had been given ten to twenty with time off for good behavior
William Gaddis
#74. I'll tell you why yes, because why people lie is, because when people stop lying you know they've stopped caring.
William Gaddis
#75. How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.
William Gaddis
#76. Reading Proust isn't just reading a book, it's an experience and you can't reject an experience.
William Gaddis
#77. The doctrine of preemption has a long and distinguished history in the history of American foreign policy.
John Lewis Gaddis
#78. What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey
William Gaddis
#79. ... frankly I'm not going to listen to someone hold forth on the Greatest Music of All Time if they start with the beatles. If they start with Mozart I'll have a little patience; because I know that Bach is better.
Nathan "N.R." Gaddis
#80. It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.
John Lewis Gaddis
#81. Revisionism is a healthy historiographical process, and no one, not even revisionists, should be exempt from it.
John Lewis Gaddis
#82. Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people to protect themselves from talented people ...
William Gaddis
#83. I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there's always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!
William Gaddis
#84. The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa....Leonardo had eye trouble....Art couldn't explain it....But now we're safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf...
William Gaddis
#86. -I'm reviewing it, the stooped man said, and started to plod off.
-You read it?
-No, he said over his shoulder, -but I know the son of a bitch who wrote it.
William Gaddis
#87. Stupidity's the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.
William Gaddis
#89. TO A CHILD, BEHELD IN SUMMER RAIMENT
Little girl, one lesser garment
will suffice to clothe your crotch,
Hide that undiscovered cavern
Where old Time will wind his watch.
William Gaddis
#90. As my former Yale colleague Rogers Smith has put it: Elegance is not worth that price.
John Lewis Gaddis
#91. The most difficult challenge to the ideal is its transformation into reality, and few ideals survive.
William Gaddis
#93. Despite the legacy of slavery, the near extermination of native Americans, and persistent racial, sexual, and social discrimination, the citizens of the United States could plausibly claim, in 1945, to live in the freest society on the face of the earth.
John Lewis Gaddis
#94. There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.
William Gaddis
#95. He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?
William Gaddis
#96. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had been born in revolution. Both embraced ideologies with global aspirations: what worked at home, their leaders assumed, would also do so for the rest of the world.
John Lewis Gaddis
#98. Do you know why the French are so honest? because there are so few words in their language they're forced to be.
William Gaddis
#99. He stood there unsteady in the cold, mumbling syllables which almost resolved into her name, as though he could recall, and summon back, a time before death entered the world, before accident, before magic, and before magic despaired, to become religion.
William Gaddis
#100. That's what I can't stand. I know I'll bounce back, and that's what I can't stand.
William Gaddis
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