Quotes from Donald Antrim

There is nothing more seductive — and dangerous — than being listened to.

The simple question 'What color do you want to paint that upstairs room?' might, if we follow things to their logical conclusions, be stated: 'How do I live, knowing that I will one day die and leave you?

We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes.

I hope that you will be faced with difficult choices and decisions, trials that won't undo you, but that will drive you toward reflection and understanding. Trust that your fears will sometimes tell you about your desires. You will see that you can survive the terror that comes with growth and change, with vulnerability and risk.

Have you ever noticed?--people, no matter how beautiful or desirable, invariably will, if observed closely while going about their daily business of keeping alive, begin to seem like monsters.

Parents seem to embrace, almost unquestioningly, this bizarre, superstitious belief in infant clairvoyance, as though their "innocent" offspring have access to deep truths lost to them, to the parents—lost to maturity, cynicism, compromise. It's one of our most esteemed cultural archetypes: the Prescient Child.

One of the sad features of most close relationships is the decay of intimacy as a function of time, turmoil, and all the little misunderstandings that inevitably occur between people, leading them, year in and year out, toward the same tired conclusions: conversation falters; friendships fail.

Human beings in stressful relationships will frequently behave in ways that contradict or even reverse their own most certain expectations.

Let him hurl these pieces of toast like new and radical ideas that must be cast into the world. Pieces of toast like angry children who will hit us and upset us and change our ways of thinking and feeling.

my insides were ulcerous from coffee and terror.

Der Fuß war beerdigt, ich war groggy und mein Kaffee war kalt.

Choice, with its inevitable invitations to loss, is always such a trial.

I think most observance is really more a way of conceptualizing day-to-day life as what it actually is for many people, a progress of meaningful failures.

Relationships are like powerful moods that people share.

Readers of symbols are forever at the mercy of desire.