Quotes from Nicholson Baker

The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.

Why are things beautiful? I don´t know. That´s a good question. Isn´t it pleasing when you ask a question of a person, a teacher, or a speaker, and he or she says, That´s a good question? Don´t you feel good when that happens?

Abelardo, my manager, emerged from a stall. "What do you think, Howie?" he said; it was his standard greeting —one I was fond of. "Abe, I don't know what to think," I said; my standard response.

The two plants had a gentleman's agreement going, like the railroad companies and the real-estate speculators in the old days, whereby they progressed together up the hill and into the yard.

I ate a vendor's hot dog with sauerkraut (a combination whose tastiness still makes me tremble), walking fast in order to save as much of the twenty minutes of my lunch hour I had left for reading.

I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of a man I had hoped I might be

Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach a point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me when I was an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child?

Also, mugs, like car bumpers and T-shirts, have become places for people to proclaim allegiances, names, hobbies, heroes, graphic tastes.

Head & Shoulders (a repulsive name for a shampoo, when you think of it, but you never do)

During a 10-year period the locomotives of Egypt made us of no other fuel than that furnished by the well-wrapped, compact mummies.

So the first thing about the history of rhyme . . . is that it's all happened before. It's all part of these huge rhymeorhythmic circles of exuberance and innovation and surfeit and decay and resurrectional primitivism and waxing sophistication and infill and overgrowth and too much and we can't stand it and let's stop and do something else.

With fewer total cells, but more connections between each cell, the quality of your knowledge undergoes a transformation: you begin to have a feel for situations, people fall into types, your past memories link together, and your life begins to seem, as it hadn't when you were younger, an inevitable thing composed of a million small failures and successes dependently intergrown, as opposed to a bright beadlike row of unaffiliated moments.

The nice thing about putting on your glasses in the dark is that you know you could see better if it were light, but since it is dark the glasses make no difference at all.

There are no key terms. There are no themes, no thesis sentences. There are no main ideas. Life's curriculum is infinite. Most of the interesting things we know we can't explain. Most of what we need to know we were not taught.

You can write a three-decker novel or a whole history of Transylvania without knowing or caring in the least what the parts of speech are—and in first grade, unless you're an unusual little person who takes an Aristotelian pleasure in verbal classification, it's an unnecessary encumbrance and a distraction.

IN TOKYO, the American ambassador to Japan heard something about a possible surprise attack. "There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack at Pearl Harbor," the ambassador, Joseph Grew, wrote in his diary. "Of course I informed my government." It was January 24, 1941.

sometimes it's hard to tell the truth because you the truth is hard to see, because it exists in a misty, gray non-space between two strongly charged falsehoods that sound true but aren't.

sometimes it's hard to tell the truth because the truth is hard to see, because it exists in a misty, gray non-space between two strongly charged falsehoods that sound true but aren't.

anthology knowledge isn't real knowledge.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT and her husband, Franklin D., the assistant secretary of the navy, were invited to a party in honor of Bernard Baruch, the financier. "I've got to go to the Harris party which I'd rather be hung than seen at," Eleanor wrote her mother-in-law. "Mostly Jews." It was January 14, 1918.

After many tries and much sighing Sharon overrode the system and sent my flawed scans off to the identity service, IdentoGO, run by MorphoTrust USA, a subsidiary of Safran, which is a French manufacturer of aerospace components, bombs, and drones.

Isn't crying a good thing? Why would we want to give pills to people so they don't weep? When you read a great line in a poem, what's the first thing you do? You can't help it. Crying is a good thing.

True poet's depression is a rigor mortis of agony. It's a full body inability to function. You don't want to leave your room.

Gandhi gave a statement at his trial. "I am endeavoring to show to my countrymen that violent non-cooperation only multiplies evil and that as evil can only be sustained by violence, withdrawal of support of evil requires complete abstention from violence," he said.