Quotes from Helen DeWitt

People who generalise about people are dismissed as superficial. It's only when you've known large numbers of people that you can spot the unusual ones—when you look at each one as if you'd never seen one before, they all look alike.

So Lucille pressed the button, and a panel slid open in the wall, and the transporter came through, and sure enough here was the bare butt of the client waiting to be whipped. For reasons best known to himself he had kept his shoes and socks on, so he was wearing well-polished black loafers and black silk socks.

There is a character in The Count of Monte Cristo who digs through solid rock for years and finally gets somewhere: he finds himself in another cell. It was that kind of moment.

This is so bad for him. Hundreds of people saying wonderful marvellous far too young what a genius. It seems to me that it is does not take miraculous intelligence to master the simple fact that '??????‡? is Odysseus, if you go on to master 5,000 similar simple facts you have only shown that you are a miracle of obstinacy.

In her excitement at the idea of just walking out the door she had walked out the door without stopping to practice and without even her sheet music, and now she had nothing to play from and nothing prepared. Some people might have been daunted by this setback. The Konigsbergs faced musical catastrophe on a daily basis, & their motto was: Never say die.

I would see languages with shades of each other, like the colours of Cézanne which often have a green with some red a red with some green, in my mind I saw a glowing still life as if a picture of English with French words French with English words German with French words & English words Japanese with French English & German words—I was just about to leave when I met a man who seemed to know quite a lot about Schoenberg.

Truth be told, you can make a hell of a lot more money by being wrong at the right time than by being right at the wrong time.

His youngest sister, Linda, wanted to be a singer and she had now refused point-blank to go to secretarial college; his father had refused pointblank to let her study music. Linda had gone to the piano and begun to play Chopin's Prelude No. 24 in D minor, a bitter piece of music which gains in tragic intensity when played 40 times in a row.

I looked at this polite little sentence & sat crying on the bed —

Sometimes the world is too convincing, as if someone spent too much time on it.

Why is it, do you suppose," said Edward, "that the Continental breakfast has only to cross the Channel to be so damp and depressing. It seems simple enough; why does it travel so badly? In England one wonders whether it is really meant to be eaten. Here it is invariably ambrosial." "It is the tyranny of the toast rack," said Maria.

Brian starts telling stories about Derrida: perfectly happy, it seems, to accept all the privileges of the author. Theories of authorial absence, says Brian, tend to leave out the curious circumstance that the author is always there to pick up his cheque.

Reflected, framed, the room had charms foreign to the original, just as an ordinary or even ugly object gains beauty and dignity when painted or photographed.

Once he had a foot in the door he explained, "It's not for me to make moral judgments. I'm a businessman. I deal with people as they are, not as they ought to be." "Speaking

There were all these conservative colors that you don't see any more, this navy blue, navy blue is the hardest color to match so it dates really obviously because the idea people have in their head of a dark neutral blue changes over the years, people in the fashion industry, the way they perceive a dark blue is affected by the other colors they are working with at the time.

WE APPROXIMATE THE BIRD'S BODY BY A SPHERE OF RADIUS 5CM, said Sib, I had no idea aerodynamics was so entertaining

It's not against Lottery regulations to lose, obviously - somebody's got to - but it's against the Rules to be seen to lose. It's against the Rules to be seen to win. It's not just that you break the Rules by sitting there. It's that you put everyone else in the position of ostentatious Rulebreakers, manoeuvred into flashing their luck just by walking to work.

I thought: Yes, to live the life of the mind is the truest form of happiness.

A brilliant white light beat pitilessly down, like the fierce desert sun at midday on the French Foreign Legion; the glittering floor dazzled the eye with the cruel desert glare. We walked slowly through the cereals.

There is an obvious difference between someone who works within the technical limitations of his time which are beyond his control and someone who accepts without thinking limitations which are entirely within his own power to set aside.

A goose instinctively heads south in a V-formation in a V formed of other geese instinctively heading south. It doesn't check out the beach and experiment with a sandpiper lifestyle. It does what it's designed to do.

When a human being develops an argument, when a human being attempts not only to think but to speak with precision, he or she is often made to feel that this is a mark of social inadequacy and that there is something comical about it. The younger the human being, the more humorous it becomes. So that humans whose inclination it is to think and speak in this way become self-conscious from an early age, and a kind of minstrelisation creeps in.

You need something to set against it. When you've seen that much badness you need something to set against it—some dazzling glorious act of goodness—not to redeem your faith in humanity, whatever that might mean, but just to make you stop feeling sick.

The world would be quite a pretty place if the only people tormented by atrocities were those who'd committed them.