Donald Barthelme Quotes

80 Sourced Quotes

My deranged mother has written another book. This one is called The Bough and is even worse that the others. I refer not to its quality—it exhibits the usual coruscating wit and penetrating social observation —but to the extent to which it utilizes, as a kind of mulch pile, the lives of her children.

Donald Barthelme
Let me point out, if it has escaped your notice, that what an artist does, is fail.

Donald Barthelme
The death of God left the angels in a strange position. They were overtaken suddenly by a fundamental question. One can attempt to imagine the moment. How did they look at the instant the question invaded them, flooding the angelic consciousness, taking hold with terrifying force? The question was, "What are angels?" New to questioning, unaccustomed to terror, unskilled in aloneness, the angels (we assume) fell into despair.

Donald Barthelme
Best not to anticipate too much... it jiggles the possibilities.

Donald Barthelme
Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.

Donald Barthelme
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The present goal of the individual in group enterprises is to avoid dominance; leadership is felt to be a character disorder.

Donald Barthelme
BILL: … 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
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.

Donald Barthelme
It is not true that Kafka wanted Brod to burn his manuscripts after his death. Rather it is the case that Kafka was on fire to be published... rushed to the postbox day after day... ate with editors... intrigued for favorable notices... read the Writer's Digest... consorted with critics... autographed napkins... made himself available to librarians... spoke on the radio...

Donald Barthelme
Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don't count?

Donald Barthelme
I went out into the garage and told Bill an interesting story which wasn't true. Some people feel you should tell the truth, but those people are impious and wrong, and if you listen to what they say, you will be tragically unhappy all your life.

Donald Barthelme
I keep wondering if, say, there is intelligent life on other planets, the scientists argue that something like two percent of the other planets have the conditions, the physical conditions, to support life in the way it happened here, did Christ visit each and every planet, go through the same routine, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and so on...

Donald Barthelme
"It's true," Carl said, "with a kind of merde-y inner truth which shines forth as the objective correlative of what actually did happen, back home."

Donald Barthelme
These games are marvelous, Amanda said. I like them especially because they are so meaningless and boring, and trivial. These qualities, once regarded as less than desirable, are now everywhere enthroned as the key elements in our psychological lives, as reflected in the art of the period as well as—

Donald Barthelme
People who had, in the past, suffered from technophobia suffered even more. Others took other positions. Things were not so bad. Things could be worse. Worse things could be imagined. Worse things had been endured and triumphed over, in the past. This was not the worst. The worst was yet to come.

Donald Barthelme
The Continental Congress resolved that your famous plainness and modesty would be ill served were it known that a house for your horse was paid for from the public purse.

Donald Barthelme
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
"Take me home," Snow White said. "Take me home instantly. If there is anything worse than being home, it is being out."

Donald Barthelme
"Is that true," I asked, "that song?"
"It is a metaphor," said Mrs. Davis, "it has metaphorical truth."
"And the end of the mechanical age," I said, "is that a metaphor?"
"The end of the mechanical age," said Mrs. Davis, "is in my judgment an actuality straining to become a metaphor. One must wish it luck, I suppose. One must cheer it on. Intellectual rigor demands that we give these damned metaphors every chance, even if they are inimical to personal well-being and comfort. We have a duty to understand everything, whether we like it or not–a duty I would scant if I could." At that moment the water jumped into the boat and sank us.

Donald Barthelme
When I was hired they showed me my desk, an old beat-up scarred wooden desk, and they told me that it had been O. Henry's desk when O. Henry worked for the paper, as he had at one time. And I readily believed it. I could see the place where O. Henry had savagely stabbed the desk with his pen in pursuit of a slimy adjective just out of reach, and a kind of bashed-in-looking place where O. Henry had beaten his poor genius head on the desk in frustration over not being able to capture the noun leaping like a fawn just out of reach... So I sat down at the desk and I too began to chase those devils, the dancy nouns and come-hither adjectives, what joy.

Donald Barthelme
No man's plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of God's will.

Donald Barthelme
And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.

Donald Barthelme
How can you be alienated without first having been connected?

Donald Barthelme