Quotes from Fred Chappell

Our thoughts were so awesome to us, that no one could speak a word, not even 'Goodbye.' We hugged and clasped and wept silently.

No, I thank you; I have had an elegant sufficiency of the numerous delicacies. Any more would be an unsophisticated superfluity, for gastronomic satiety admonishes me that I have reached the ultimate stage of deglutition consistent with dietetic integrity.

There were too many things suddenly that I didn't understand, and I didn't know what to do about it. I knew that I needed to be older, but that's not enough. You have to have some basic information that was not yet available to me.

Perhaps I had missed a great deal, reading so continually and seeing the world through the windowpanes of books. But then, maybe not. If books had made up a large part of the experience of my youth, it only meant that what I'd missed in immediacy of experience, I'd gained in variety, looking so widely into the thought…s and dreams of others, of travelers and sages, of soldiers and scholars and all the mighty dead.

In an almost totally insentient cosmos only human feeling is interesting or relevant to what the soul searches for...suffering is the most expensive of human emotions, but it is the most intense and precious of them, because suffering most efficiently humanizes the unfeeling universe.

Multiplying my age by 2 in my head/I'm a grandfather. Or Dead.

Again he picked up a stone and kept rolling it in his hands. His hands were damp with mounting excitement. What was it that everyone in the world knew but he? There was something grave and black being kept from him, and he could feel how important it was, how imminent, and he was desperate to know.

Every hour is another syllable in your epitaph.

Poetry is a mode of consciousness.

Each time I reach outside my skin/I just get lonesome for what's within.

What did he know about her, anyway? She was unfathomable. The simple fact that she countenanced Coke Rymer at all was unfathomable. All her motives were buried under the ocean.

Dagon was simply one more of the pagan fertility deities; in Phoenicia his name was connected with the word dagan, meaning "corn," though this name finally derived from a Semitic root meaning "fish.

And her face remembered was intractable entirely; it wouldn't respond to any maneuver of his imagination, it offered no similes, as totally itself as the taste of garlic.